In the run up to Money 20/20 USA in October 2018, the main global payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, and American Express) announced concerted efforts to improve the convenience and security of remote, i.e., e-commerce and m-commerce, payments. The initiatives focus on driving merchant adoption of credential-on-file tokenisation, and on preparing to implement Secure Remote Commerce (SRC), a new framework and specifications published by EMVCo, an industry standards body.

The EMVCo payments tokenisation was introduced in 2014 with the launch of Apple Pay. However, tokenisation has so far mostly focused on supporting mobile proximity payments, the adoption of which has been slow.

We believe the cards-centric ecosystem is now at a critical juncture. Unlike proximity payments, remote commerce payments today lack standards. Deploying standards such as tokenisation, 3DS 2.0, and SRC should deliver clear benefits.