Now, more than ever, data security and confidentiality are critical parts of any business strategy. Companies incur high expenses and face ongoing challenges in securing their confidential data, networks, and systems from fraudsters while complying with various evolving data security standards, such as PCI DSS, in order to help avoid substantial monetary losses, penalties, and a damaged reputation.

Citi^® is excited to launch Citi Commercial Cards Tokenization, a next generation technology where Citi takes care of storing, maintaining and processing your commercial card information to help secure cardholder data, significantly reduce PCI DSS scope, and cut costs.

What is Tokenization?
Tokenization is the process of substituting a sensitive data element with a non-sensitive equivalent, referred to as a token, which has no extrinsic or exploitable meaning or value.

How does commercial cards tokenization work?
Employee cardholder data is transmitted to Citi via a one-time secure transfer process. Payment card account numbers (PANs) are then tokenized and stored in Citi's highly secure environment. Citi's proprietary tokenization algorithm generates a random and unique number for each PAN.

Clients are given the custom tokens in return to store within their expense and accounts payable systems in place of the actual employee card account numbers. All data files exchanged thereafter between the client and Citi include tokenized values only. Citi maintains a highly secure reference database in order to exchange token values for PANs for payment processing purposes.

Benefits of Tokenization

• Increases data protection
• Reduces the PCI DSS assessment scope
• Reduces risk and potential data exposure
• Reduces costs on data security, technology, & compliance
• Does not have additional infrastructure costs
• Is simple to implement

For more information about our Commercial Cards Tokenization offering, please contact a Citi Account Manager or Citi Client Account Specialist.