CCAvenue

The Indian e-commerce sector has been witnessing phenomenal growth and the country is estimated to have almost 320 million online shoppers by the year 2020, as per a Morgan Stanley report. Large e-commerce businesses have now started providing enhanced user experience through smooth checkout mechanism, one-click payments and online transaction security to end customers. These businesses strive to adhere to the latest Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) that primarily focuses on enhanced controls around the storing, transferring and processing of cardholder data with an aim to reduce credit card fraud. Maintaining PCI DSS standards however involves high expenditure and complications which many e-commerce players would not be able to manage.

CCAvenue, being a PCI DSS v3.2 compliant payment gateway offers online merchants and their customers an unparalleled level of data security through tokenization. Since these stringent data protection requirements are fulfilled by CCAvenue, the partnering e-commerce business may not be PCI DSS compliant and yet reap full benefits of data security.

CCAvenue's tokenization feature 'Card Storage Vault' is a One-Click payment solution that offers a faster and seamless checkout experience. It allows merchants to reuse stored card information for future transactions.

What is Tokenization?
Tokenization is the process of replacing the 16-digit payment card account number with a unique digital identifier known as a 'token' in mobile and online transactions. Tokens contain confidential information that proves an identity, such as credit card details or personal data that appears as a random string of characters. Because of these randomly assigned tokens, it's almost impossible to penetrate this encryption and reverse-engineer or compromise a token. Hence, using this encrypted information during payment limits the impact of a data breach. To understand the process of tokenization, let's look at what happens from the time a customer uses his credit card till the payment is processed.

• A unique token is generated by CCAvenue and sent to the merchant when a customer does an initial transaction
• For a repeat transaction, the merchant sends the token to CCAvenue
• CCAvenue accepts this token and displays the stored card details to the customer
• The customer enters card credentials like CVV number and OTP to complete the transaction

IMPACT OF TOKENIZATION ON ONLINE BUSINESSES & CUSTOMERS
Tokenization helps online businesses improve their data security from the point of data capture till the payment is processed. As it stores encrypted tokens containing random characters and not the actual card numbers on their system, hackers would acquire tokens, which are of no use to them. This minimizes the impact of security breaches for merchants.

Customers consider tokenization to be highly secure because of the fact that multiple tokens are issued for the same card while processing payments on different platforms that use tokenization. The customers can also find the process very convenient as every time they use their cards on a merchant's web store, the same token number is given to the merchant's system. This makes it easy to recall customer's card details for more efficient and faster repeat transactions.

CCAvenue's Card Storage Vault is an advanced tokenization solution that helps businesses enhance data security while keeping their systems beyond the scope of PCI DSS compliance. It also provides convenience to customers by way of one-click payments and easy checkout.