Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading enterprise businesses, has now issued over two billion active network tokens. This milestone shows that Adyen is paving the way for businesses to embrace the innovation of network tokenization which converts regular card numbers into secure non-sensitive tokens.

Security remains a top priority for businesses, however, this no longer needs to come at the expense of the customer experience. Through network tokenization, businesses have seen an average of 3% uplift in authorization rates equating to a multi-million dollar increase in revenue every month. Since network tokens are less expensive to process than a PAN card payment, businesses can reduce costs, while increasing transaction approval rates and revenue. This is especially transformative for subscription or digital businesses that offer customers "save card details" features making it easier than ever to shop online.

The rapid growth in digital payments and e-commerce in recent years, accelerated further by the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in a striking rise in payment fraud. Adyen’s own research finds that 39% of businesses report an increase in fraud attempts over the last 12 months, while just 60% have effective fraud systems in place. With payment fraud becoming a critical challenge to businesses across all industries, network tokenization is key to creating a future of secure, and seamless online payments

“Network tokenization is a powerful tool,” says Trevor Nies, Global Head of Digital at Adyen. “It brings the two-fold benefit of increasing customer security, while increasing authorization rates, and therefore revenue for businesses. With Adyen’s technology, which supports the major card schemes, we are seeing that more and more businesses realize the potential in network tokens.”

Network tokenization is an emerging technology and as such not all issuers currently support it. To solve this challenge Adyen offers network token optimization which uses machine learning to choose between a network token or PAN payment to boost authorization rates. This drives an additional 1% uplift in authorization rates for businesses.