It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing about payment tokenization for 11 yrs. Tokenization is an overloaded term with multiple definitions. Last week McKinsey wrote a fantastic article on crypto tokenization, this note is about the tokenization of card numbers (PAN to DPAN) performed by network tokenization services like Visa Tokenization Service (VTS) and Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES). 

This week the US DOJ opened a probe into network tokenization services (Bloomberg). The specifics of the probe are not known