As part of a long-running DOJ investigation, enforcement officials have begun probing the payment giant’s policies for charging retailers more if they don’t use Visa’s proprietary “tokenization” technology. The service, which swaps sensitive card numbers with tokens that can only be used on a specific device or with a particular merchant, is designed to improve the security of any given payment.
“In addition to enhancing security, tokenization can reduce friction in the payment process by enabling financial institutions to automatically update expired or compromised payment credentials without any manual updates made by the customer in the event that their Visa card is lost, stolen or expired,” Visa says on its website.