you might have heard the term tokenization thrown around and
you're curious what exactly does that mean well you come to the right place
we're gonna cover this in business terms that all of us can understand let's dig in
first off it's important to understand the tokenization is an industry standard and
it's more or less required by the pci-dss for all organizations that take credit cards now
that's not to say that it's impossible to be PCI compliant without using tokenization however it
does become much more challenging tokenization is a technology that was developed industry-wide
to ensure the cardholder data is kept secure this is accomplished by the receiver of the cardholder
data assigning a random string of characters and returning that string to the provider of
the cardholder data okay I promise we talked about this and simple business terms let me
try that again and short us merchants we give the credit card number through encryption to a trusted
partner most likely your payment gateway the payment gateway will in turn give you a reference
that represents that credit card in their system but just for you now a token it cannot
be deciphered because it wasn't encrypted instead this is a random string that's assigned to that
credit card number that you the merchant gave that gateway I guess this probably makes sense for most
of us however I've come up with a kind of simple analogy that I think paints the picture pretty
well and it also helps us understand how the system is secure ok let's say that you go to Las
Vegas to play blackjack and let's also say that you start off the MGM Grand or you sit down at the
table you hand them $100 and they hand you back $25 tokens and while you're in the MGM Grand those
tokens are essentially as good as cash money now let's say that you want a hundred bucks from them
then you walk across the street to go to New York New York now you may know that New York New York
is actually owned by MGM however your tokens from the MGM Grand are not gonna work with the New York
New York they're only currency at the MGM Grand if you were to put them on the table at New York New
York you'd be told that you can't play with them they're just no good there so I believe that this
is a solid analogy for the payments industry and how we work with tokens a token that you
get from your payment gateway is only good when you the merchants are signed in to that payment
gateway the tokenize card data might be able to be shared across multiple meds and that does happen
from time to time and something you should talk to your payment gateway about if if that's something
you need but this is a big part of what makes this system so secure because of a disgruntled employee
or some other sort of attacker manages to get their hands on these tokens there have no use
to them even if this would-be attacker somehow also got your credentials and got signed in to
your gateway account they still would be unable to use those tokens to get any money as those tokens
are tied through your merchants ID to your bank account even if this attacker did try to charge
something against the token the money would be in your bank account fully within your control
for you to reverse if you wanted to dive deeper into the technical details there's many other
videos here on YouTube that will explain that in whatever detail you want to understand I'm
hopeful that this video helps some of us business users better understand the value and that tokens
can bring to our businesses and why we should all be using them it's worth noting that there's
sometimes a cost that your gateway is going to tack on to tokenize that cardholder data for you
and it's also noteworthy that most gateways now will also tokenize bank account data for all of
us so both cards and accounts can be tokenized and the value I feel like it's easy to see if
you're not storing Christopher's credit card numbers then you couldn't be at fault if they
end up in the wrong hands at charging we recommend that all of our customers tokenize all of their
card data that they use throughout their entire organization to facilitate this we have developed
our API our payment console and our payment request features to ensure that the protected
cardholder data that you've been entrusted with is never stored inside the Salesforce system for
any amount of time have questions about anything we've talked about here well feel free to drop
a question in the comments below or you can also click the link here on your screen to get in touch
with us the chargin team is always here to help hey thank you for watching our video and while
you're here please subscribe to our channel click that notification bell for immediate
updates and if you'd like to talk payments please get in touch we're always here to help