Improve digital payment security with Payment Account Reference

Prevent a customer’s actual credit card or account details from being exposed during payments

What is Payment Account Reference?

With tokenization, each unique primary account number (PAN) linked to a Payment Account is replaced by a Payment Account Reference (PAR)—a non-financial reference value token that represents the PAN.

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How Payment Account Reference Works

PAN refers to the card number of the cardholder’s credit card, debit card, store credit card, or gift card.

Each PAR number is made of 29 unique alphanumeric characters and does not change throughout the PAN’s lifecycle event.

Token is an algorithmically generated number to protect the payment account’s sensitive data during the payment process.

Why Payment Account Reference?

PAR provides a consolidated view of transactions associated with a PAN and its affiliated tokens, leading to a number of benefits across the merchant value chain.


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