Mastercard is launching a global payments tokenisation service for Amazon customers.

The payments giant is rolling out the service, which makes a secure digital record of stored card credentials to Amazon customers in 12 countries, including the UK, US, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, Mexico and United Arab Emirates.

Tokenisation replaces a consumer’s physical card number with a digital token, which eliminates the need to manually update card credentials and ensures that payment information is unique to each individual transaction and can be used only by the merchant that requested it.

Amazon will begin rolling out Mastercard tokens for transactions over the course of this year.

The launch comes in response to the rise of online shopping, for which consumers save and manage their card details across multiple e-commerce sites. Amazon, along with other global merchants, is now using tokenisation technology to ensure the cards consumers store on file stay seamlessly up to date.

Unlike physical cards, network tokens do not expire – when consumers receive a new physical card from their bank, their credentials are automatically updated, eliminating the hassle of reentering their card numbers, reducing checkout interruptions and cart abandonment.

Mastercard’s solution works by displaying familiar card art for every user, aimed at helping consumers choose their preferred payment method more efficiently.

According to research from Mastercard and Kantar, 80 per cent of cardholders are likely to complete a purchase when an image of their specific credit card is shown.

Jorn Lambert, executive vice president for digital solutions at Mastercard, said: “The behavioural shift that we are seeing has accelerated in recent months, but it’s a product of our work to create the infrastructure and partner ecosystem, for the digitally-savvy consumer and forward-thinking businesses like Amazon.”

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