Canada is said by Bell ID to be at the forefront of contactless payments, and has been driving the adoption of this technology since 2005 when it started issuing contactless cards to their customers and compatible terminals to merchants.
Now, Interac, the national debit network in Canada, is reported to have raised the bar again by bringing Apple Pay mobile payments to millions across the country. Couple this with the ‘tap and go’ culture that is already familiar to consumers, and Interac expects a significant uptake on the use of this technology.
Apple Pay in Canada
Canadian debit cardholders with a compatible Apple device can now conveniently make secure contactless transactions by simply adding their Interac debit cards to Apple Wallet. This will allow consumers to use their cell phone to shop at the hundreds of thousands of merchants where contactless payments are already accepted in Canada. In addition, Interac cardholders can take advantage of the security and privacy that are at the core of Apple Pay.
Customer payment card details are not stored on the device or Apple servers. Rather, they are replaced with a unique device account number that is encrypted and stored in the secure element of the device. Each transaction is authorised with a one-time unique dynamic security code. All of this data is essentially worthless if obtained by fraudsters.
This process takes advantage of the Interac Token Service Provider (TSP) to ensure each Apple Pay transaction is validated with a one-time unique token. The Interac TSP was developed in collaboration with Bell ID, allowing Interac to support Apple Pay integration with secure tokenisation services.
Taking control of tokenisation
The role of the token service provider (TSP) is to manage the tokenisation process, including hosting the secure token vault, and ensuring customers’ and banks’ sensitive data is kept secure. When deploying tokenisation technology to integrate with various mobile payments platforms, banks have a number of options. They can choose to become their own TSP and take control of their own tokenisation activity. Another option is to host it with a trusted third party, while still maintaining control of the implementation and sensitive data. Alternatively, tokenisation can be completely outsourced to payments schemes.
To learn more see the video on payment tokenisation or visit the resources section for eBooks and case studies.
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