India has issued 560 million tokens in the last one year: Visa

Around 560 million card tokens have been issued in India since October 2022, when the Reserve Bank of India mandated tokenisation of cards for ecommerce transactions, global card payment scheme Visa said in a report.

Out of these, Visa has issued around 300 million tokens, said the report, to be released on Thursday.

Titled Enabling the Digital Shift: Tokenisation in India’s Economic Landscape, the report has predicted that the gross transaction value of digital payments in the country would clock $5.2 trillion by 2030, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 14%.


But the report also highlighted the surge in cyberattacks, shooting from 0.2 million in 2018 to 1.3 million in 2022. To protect consumers from such fraud attacks, card tokenisation has been helpful.

The central bank mandated tokenisation of credit and debit cards so that ecommerce merchants do not get access to the unique card number of the customer. Card schemes like Visa and Mastercard convert this card number into a set of random tokens so that even if a fraudster steals customer data from the merchant site, the unique card details remain safe.

Visa has predicted that India would reach the 100 million credit card mark by the end of 2023, from 93 million as of September.

Calling out the future of tokenisation, Visa said use cases like transit payments, payments using smartphones and wearables would pick up in the future.

Overall tokenisation will help simplify payments, reduce fraud and improve the experience around business-to-business payments among other things, the report said.

“As the country pushes towards a digital economy with an increasing volume of transactions, tokenisation has immense potential to further digitise the payment ecosystem. With a substantial 560 million tokens already in circulation and a fast-paced growth rate, we foresee tokenisation becoming a pivotal force in the evolution of digital payments,” the report quoted RBI executive director P Vasudevan as saying.