For centuries, physical vaults have guarded money and jewels behind steel doors, but what shields the invisible currency of our digital age – customer data?
Security stands as the cornerstone of every online enterprise, particularly when managing sensitive financial information. Payment Orchestration delivers a protective shield around customers' payment details, creating a clean, worry-free transaction path while maintaining rock-solid security behind the scenes.
Tokenization is the first step to protecting payment data. It swaps out sensitive data, like card details or bank account numbers, with a randomized number that has no intrinsic value of its own.
This differs from encryption, where a number is mathematically changed but its initial pattern remains stored within the new code. Encrypted data can be decrypted with the appropriate key, but tokens cannot be reversed because there is no mathematical relationship between the token and its original number.
There are a few common types of tokenization found in payments:
Ultimately, these types of tokens used individually or in concert help airlines and travel merchants ensure PCI DSS compliance, control costs, increase payments efficiency, reduce the risk of data breaches, and improve the customer experience.
Due to these benefits, current market analysis shows extraordinary growth in this sector. According to Mordor Intelligence, the tokenization market is projected to reach $6.30 billion in 2025 and grow at a CAGR of 17.68% to reach $14.21 billion by 2030. This growth reflects the critical nature of tokenization technology in our increasingly digital economy.
Tokenization works to not only improve security for sensitive data but also reduce compliance scope and associated costs for businesses. It also offers the basis for payment vaulting, which makes the payment process more convenient and secure for customers.
All merchants want to simplify the checkout process for returning customers. One way to achieve this is by securely storing their payment details in a “vault” for convenient future use.
Recent research reveals that 18% of U.S. online shoppers have abandoned carts in the past quarter solely due to "too long or complicated checkout processes." Another 7% of shoppers will abandon their orders if the site doesn't offer their preferred payment method. One-click checkout can reduce cart abandonment rates, but only if customers are offered the option of storing their payment data to make subsequent purchases much easier.
This sensitive payment data can be held by the merchant at its own storage vault, at a cost. Storing customer credit card data in-house is expensive, and the disadvantages of building your own data storage vault outweigh the benefits. It’s often safer, more cost-effective, and easier to find a payment partner that offers tokenization and vaulting to handle this process on your behalf.
When a customer card gets vaulted, and that card fails via one gateway, an alternative gateway can process the card successfully. Routing payments made with vaulted cards also comes into play if the rates with a cross-border payment provider have been reduced, to prioritize this routing over another provider.
To ensure sensitive payment data is stored securely, strict regulations must be met, and a PCI-DSS Level 1 certified environment is a prerequisite. Putting this infrastructure in place is a costly and complex undertaking, so many businesses rely on their PSPs to store this data. Like all PSPs, Payment Orchestration Platforms (POPs) must meet PCI-DSS compliance and other security requirements for digital payments.
The growing emphasis on data security is directly tied to the rising incidence of financial fraud. Research data shows that organizations are turning to tokenization and vaulting precisely because it helps them meet regulatory compliance standards while maintaining high levels of fraud prevention.
Advanced tokenization solutions now enable companies to maintain data security without compromising the customer experience – a crucial balance as data from 2025 indicates that 50% of customers abandon checkout processes that take longer than 30 seconds to complete, regardless of security measures in place.
Vaulting and tokenization are among the most in-demand Payment Orchestration services. They are deeply integrated into our platform with benefits such as:
Our Payment Orchestration Platform helps you meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of a complex global payment landscape. Our experts can help you implement progressive payment strategies that positively impact profitability, enhance your customer experience, and improve operational efficiency.
Request a demo today to learn how our platform and our expertise can help optimize your payment systems.
