Credit card companies are now placing a greater emphasis on privacy, and protecting the account information of both their customers and other businesses. And with this in mind, Visa has rolled out a new kind of protection that is already winning acclaim from leading identity theft protection companies.
According to 3Delta Systems, a company that is among the best in online credit card payment solutions, Visa's innovative new identity theft protection system is a "global industry best." The process, which involves a process called "tokenization," basically takes consumers' real credit card data and makes it unusable by hackers while keeping it readable for itself.
The company said that Visa's system converts all the information from a customer's purchase - their 16-digit credit card number as well as other information related to the transaction - into a string of characters that hackers cannot decrypt, which renders it useless to them. The tokenization process not only protects consumers and merchants, but also payment processors, and in doing so reduces the amount of risk and the costs associated with complying with data-security laws.
"We congratulate Visa for validating the value of tokenization services such as CardVault, an innovative technology that major enterprises and government agencies are using every day to safely process their customers' credit cards online and safeguard that data from security breaches," said Aaron Bills, founder and chief operating officer of 3Delta Systems.
In addition, 3Delta Systems had praise for every facet of Visa's tokenization process, starting with how the company generates the tokens it uses. The lender is also considered an industry leader in token mapping - the process by which the token is associated with the original information it encrypts - as well as the way it stores that data. Visa also earned praise for the way it manages the system that generates the keys used to decipher the tokens, the most important part of protecting consumers and vendors from identity theft.
Because more people are being affected by identity theft related to their credit card every year, it is important for consumers to be aware of the measures their lenders offer in the event of a fraudulent purchase. While many lenders spell out these measures in the initial agreement, it may be important for consumers to revisit them from time to time to ensure they are aware of the policies regarding illegitimate transactions.