Push Provisioning – What is your digital strategy?
Cardholder payment technology is changing rapidly, and digital wallets have evolved alongside physical cards to expand consumer payment choices. Some financial institutions have invested heavily in the development of technologies to build their own solutions to provision physical cards to a digital wallet while others are looking to third-party providers for the expertise to make the transition easier. One third-party technology that enables digital wallet use and helps streamline cardholder experience is push provisioning.
What is Push Provisioning?
Push provisioning lets a cardholder add a debit or credit card to a specific device and digital wallet via their mobile banking app. Once provisioned, a cardholder can make a payment at a contactless point of sale (POS) terminal by simply tapping their device and authorizing the payment.
From the cardholder perspective, push provisioning is seamless – it can take less than a minute to provision a card to a digital wallet. However, to enable a cardholder to add their payment card to their digital wallet, an issuer must support provisioning of a debit or credit card to a device’s digital wallet via tokenization.
What is tokenization?
To provision a card, an issuer must be participating in tokenization before enabling push provisioning. Tokenization takes sensitive data such as a debit or credit card number, and replaces it with a 16-position numeric value. Tokenization begins with cardholder information via an API request to the association’s vault, which then generates a token and issues it to a digital wallet provider.
Why not a Virtual Card or a Digital Card?
While virtual and digital cards are effective methods for making digital payments, they work differently from a provisioned card.
A virtual card is a unique number tied to a physical card. Virtual cards have the same BIN number, expiry date and CVV as the physical card. Paying with a virtual card is a manual process where the cardholder must enter their credentials to the POS terminal or e-commerce site. Virtual cards can also offer authorization controls to restrict usage to certain locations, limits and frequency, and are often one-time use cards.
A digital card is a temporary card primarily for employee or customer incentives, rebates, and rewards. It has a unique BIN number, expiry date, CVC, and value amount. Digital cards can only be accessed via an online account and used for online transactions.
Conclusion
Financial institutions are keen to adapt to customer needs and compete for top-of-wallet. Provisioning physical debit and credit cards to digital wallets could allow for quick use after issuance, and provides a digital solution that supports cardholder choice, convenience and control while complementing physical card issuance strategies.
