We have been chatting here during the week at Lafferty Group about the future of credit cards. Might BNPL yet crush the credit card business, or has the physical card already been replaced and we haven’t really noticed?
Visa yesterday announced that its token business is beginning to outpace its physical card business. It has issued four billion tokenised card numbers this year.
“VTS (Visa Token Service) replaces 16-digit Visa account numbers with a token that only Visa can unlock, protecting the underlying account information,” writes Reuters.
"Without exposing the consumer's account to fraud, tokenization enables frictionless, card-free payments," Jack Forestell, executive vice president and chief product officer at Visa, told Reuters.
“E-commerce volume has grown by more than 50 per cent since the onset of the pandemic, the world's largest payments processor said in a statement citing data from the US Department of Commerce.
Since launching VTS in 2014, Visa said it had issued 1 billion tokens by 2020, after which growth accelerated to 2 billion in 2021 before doubling this year.