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Merchant Underwriting in an Age of Bad Agents | DPIntel

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Artificial intelligence has been used to fight payments fraud for many years, but the industry may not be ready for the scale of the threat it represents in the hands of bad actors. With the ubiquity of powerful large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, fraudsters and cybercriminals are already enjoying benefits in cost, speed and scale. But the introduction of highly autonomous AI agents has the potential to change the game and introduce a volume and complexity of fraud the industry has never before had to grapple with — the Age of Bad Agents.

In this in-depth Payments IQ series report, we’ll examine:

• How agents are changing the nature of fraud and why this represents a novel problem for payments

• Why the agentic AI playing field is not even and heavily favors fraudsters

• How malicious agents will reshape key aspects of merchant fraud, including synthetic identity creation and account takeovers

• The potential business impacts agent-driven attacks could have on payments companies that arenʼt prepared

• The qualities future underwriting must have to combat agentic fraud effectively

By the end, you’ll have an up-to-date understanding of the current state of agentic fraud threats and why it represent such a significant threat to underwriting, merchant management and, ultimately, the bottom line.

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Merchant Underwriting In An Age Of Bad Agents | DPIntel

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Standard Disclaimer: The “Reflections on my reading” series of this Substack are me using writing as a tool to capture thoughts and mold ideas as I read reports, articles, etc. Writing is a great way to cement what you’ve read and that’s the goal with these. The pieces published in this section are not refined or even really edited. You’ve been warned!

In late February, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison released their annual letter recapping 2025. I finally got around to reading it. A lot of it is corporate back-patting, but there were many parts that jumped out at me surrounding things like Stripe’s ubiquity, the brothers’ view of how the economy is sorting winners and losers, stablecoin progress and, most of all, how they see agentic commerce playing out.

In this piece, I want to focus on Stripe’s “five levels of agentic commerce.” In this section of the letter, the Collisons attempt what seems like a reset in expectations for the current status and ongoing rollout of agent-driven shopping and payments. But, they do it in the most predictably AI-serving way, laying out a five-step hierarchy of agentic commerce that renders the term even more meaningless than it’s already become. I think that’s telling, and worth looking at.

Stripe’s vision of agentic commerce is not particularly agentic

Personal note of annoyance: Substack’s spell checker puts a red line under the word “agentic,” which, at this point, c’mon. But, to be fair, it also puts one under the word “Substack,” so…

On page 9 of Stripe’s letter, the Collison brothers lay out what they see as the “five levels of agentic commerce.” To their credit, they’re trying to be more realistic about the current state of the technology. To their not-so-credit, they’re still very much agent-washing much more basic AI assistance in an attempt to place us further along on the continuum of progress than we really are. But, in any case, I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing a massive company like Stripe trying to pump the brakes on all this agentic commerce talk.

Interesting, but not surprising, especially in light of the recent reporting from The Information that OpenAI Instant Checkout, which Stripe was a high-profile partner in, has been all-but-scrapped because shoppers wouldn’t use it. That system was a key proof-of-concept on the way to agentic commerce that validated whether or not consumers would adopt even the most basic AI-integrated payments. And it failed. Surely Stripe knew this was coming, and it may have influenced the hedging angle to this letter.

In any case, I think we’re in for a long train of these high-profile “well no, not like that” walkbacks from major AI boosting companies. But, anyways, on to the five levels.

Level one: eliminating web forms

Stripe describes level one as follows:

“You research and decide what to buy. But filling out web forms is no one’s favorite way to spend a few minutes. It would be handy if you could simply send the URL to your agent and have it fill out your payment and shipping details, coming back to you with the confirmation.

The system isn’t making any decisions; it’s just typing and clicking “buy” on your behalf.”

What?

First and foremost, there is absolutely nothing agentic about this. It requires a manual prompt and completes a single, simple and well-defined task. This is a perfect example of how just because something involves even slight automation, that doesn’t make it agentic.

But, more importantly…what?

Consider what is being offered here. You still research and decide what to buy. But then, instead of spending two clicks and maybe three seconds checking out using the auto-fill feature provided by Google Wallet or Apple Wallet or Amazon or whatever you‘re running on your device or computer, you instead hand that task off to an AI system, which…clicks buy for you?

Why? What is the value proposition here? It’s true people don’t like filling out forms. Luckily, we’ve had multiple solutions for that, for many years, all of which work exceptionally well and don’t involve AI. Here, Stripe is suggesting level one AI agents as a fix for a problem we haven’t had since like 2015.

But, it’s worth noting that, while involving AI in Stripe’s first level of agentic commerce adds absolutely nothing of value and saves arguably no time, it absolutely does add risk, because AI becomes an unreliable middleman. This is like saying “I already have a perfectly functional system to automatically pay my bills, but I feel like mixing things up, so I’m going to have my mistake-prone child do it instead.”

It makes no sense.

Alright, moving on.

Level two: descriptive search

Stripe describes level two of agentic commerce as follows:

“You stop searching for products or specific attributes and start describing situations.

I need back-to-school supplies for a third grader in Chicago, including clothes (nothing too itchy or tight!), pencils, notebooks, and a lunch box. My son likes KPop Demon Hunters and tennis. School starts in late August.

The system reasons across weather, materials, sizes, durability, taste, reviews, and delivery timelines. Specialized and long-tail products become easier to find. Annoyingly blunt keyword search is no longer a thing.”

This is pure agent-washing. This is not agentic at all and there isn’t even any commerce involved. Presumably, Stripe imagines that after getting the product recommendations, you then use the head-scratching checkout from level one. At least in this case you can argue that it allows you to buy from within the LLM (although, we now know consumers don’t want to do that). But, still, this is just describing LLM search. Which is very useful, mind you. But there is no autonomy here. There is no recursion here. If this is level two of agentic commerce, then telling ChatGPT what ingredients you have in your cupboard and getting back a list of potential recipes is level two of “agentic cooking.”

Even in a letter that aims to dial back expectations for agentic commerce, these big companies can’t help but try to launder it to make it seem like it’s closer than it is.

Level three: persistence

You stop reintroducing yourself.

Find me options for back-to-school clothes for Bobby.

The system already knows your preferences and remembers any requirements, inferred from your previous conversations and purchases. You’re still deciding what to buy, but you are choosing from a set of options that already reflects your taste and budget .

Still requires a manual prompt to begin each task, still requires manual selection, still requires a manual payment authorization. All we’ve added at this level is better memory. This is still not agentic and the value proposition here is still just the same LLM-enabled search we’ve all been using for years now.

Please note that we are now at level three of the five stages of agentic commerce and we’ve yet to see anything notably…agentic. It invokes Ian Malcolm leaning into the CCTV camera and saying “now you do eventually intend to have some dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?”

Level four: delegation

“You stop choosing altogether.

Get the back-to-school shopping done. Keep it under $ 400.

The system handles the search, the evaluation process, and the purchases on your behalf. You trust it will weigh trade- offs as you would and choose things your son will like. All you do is determine the budget. (This is what most people mean today when they talk about agentic commerce.”

At level four, we’ve arrived at a point where the agent actually performs an autonomous task — in this case, making the product selection on its own and authorizing the purchase without requiring direct user sign-off. As Stripe correctly points out, this is starting to look more like the promise of agentic commerce as a technology that actually adds real value.

Level five: anticipation

“There is no prompt.

The system already knows the school calendar, your son’s preferences, and your typical budget. All you do is receive a notification: here’s the back-to-school list of everything that’s been purchased. This is the most futuristic vision, where the things you need show up right before you need them, without you having to ask.”

This level is truly autonomous, truly agentic commerce. Finally.

So, having now taken the journey all the way to the ultimate promise of the technology as something truly useful, what can we take away from Stripe’s five level model?

First, it spends the first three levels attributing basic LLM functions like conversational search to agents. It also fails to introduce any kind of autonomy into the equation until level four. And autonomy is sort of the whole point of agents. The company also aptly notes that, “today, the industry is hovering on the edge of levels 1 and 2.” I.e., we are nowhere near agentic commerce in any meaningful form that creates real value for consumers and actually has a chance of being adopted.

Levels four and five on Stripe’s hierarchy introduce so much risk, at so many levels, for so many stakeholders, and offers so little incentive for merchants, that far from being right around the corner, level four is probably five to ten years away at a minimum, if it ever happens at all, and level five is probably a fantasy.

Stripe calls level five “futuristic,” which is an apt term considering Merriam-Webster uses space elevators, space rangers and the action of Bladerunner as examples under the definition. All of those things also could happen. I’d love to hear where we are on the five levels of Bladerunner.

In all seriousness though, by tacitly admitting that the industry is currently between two levels of near-zero agentic impact, the company is giving away the game. They try to soften the blow by setting the bar for the first three levels of agentic commerce so low that they can be pointed to as progress already behind us, but it’s just more hype and agent-washing in a letter that goes out of its way to say that agentic commerce has been overhyped.

But, the fact Stripe felt the need to publish this attempted re-set of agentic commerce expectations is telling in and of itself. Stripe has invested heavily in this and so it can’t just say “whoops, it turns out it was mostly all bullshit.” So this kind of gentle reframing is probably about as strong a message as we’re going to get. Combine Stripe’s newly moderated outlook with OpenAI’s recent admission that nobody wanted to checkout through its LLM, and it’s becoming clear that AI-powered checkout and payment is not the slam dunk a lot of people seemed to think it would be.

And why? Simple. Trust. We all know this intuitively. It’s common sense.

Everyone is happy to use AI of all types when it’s for low-to-no-risk tasks. Making meme images, writing the first drafts of emails, and yes, even purchase research, all require little to no trust. But AI-driven purchases, and especially autonomous agentic commerce, require a mountain of trust. And it just isn’t there. And it isn’t just around the corner either. It may as well be light years away because LLMs will never stop hallucinating, which means they may never be reliable enough for consumers to trust with their hard-earned money. And if consumers don’t want to use agentic AI, there is no incentive for merchants to adopt it. And if merchants aren’t incentivized to adopt agentic AI, there is no incentive for consumers to use it. It will be a technology without a user base, and bajillions of dollars will have been wasted.

The world is getting smaller thanks to rapid and wide-scale digitization, and payments of all types are increasingly moving between different countries. Now, frictionless cross-border payments are becoming a major concern for both governments and private industry, as everyone from big corporations to mom-and-pop businesses to individual consumers find themselves sending money internationally more often.

In this three part series on why money moves across borders, we’ll look at all the key types of cross-border payments and the main use cases that drive volume within each one. In part one of three, we’re examining business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.

By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of all the most common ways cross-border payments flow from business users, and an understanding of why business-driven transactions are by far the most critical and high-value category of cross-border payments.

B2B: The Most Significant Cross-Border Payment Flows in a Shrinking World

In a globalized world, business-to-business transactions are the key driver of cross-border payments. In 2023, B2B cross-border payments grew by just 5%, but exceeded $158 trillion in volume. By comparison, B2C and C2B cross-border payments combined for a “mere” $4.7 trillion.

B2B will continue to be the most critical category going forward, with international supply relationships becoming more and more common. After the global pandemic, when an alarming number of small businesses found their supply chains disrupted or choked off, diversifying suppliers became a critical way to manage risk. Now, half of small and medium-sized enterprises are doing more business internationally than in 2021, and 75% are planning to increase their international business in the future.

Why the Money Moves

International Supply Chains: Trade in physical products, components, and inputs is a huge driver of B2B cross-border payments. Everything from crude oil to critical minerals to food, industrial equipment and consumer goods moves between countries and requires cross-border payments to be made to suppliers.

Cross-Border Service Procurement: Services are increasingly sourced internationally, particularly in the technology industry. “Digitally enabled services,” like cloud computing and software licenses, are the fastest growing category of global trade, and knowledge work, like coding and technical support, is now regularly outsourced to overseas suppliers.

Intra-Company Payments: Multinational corporations regularly make payments between subsidiaries and affiliates in other countries. Profit transfers, revenue sharing and intra-company loans and investments all fall under B2B flows, and are common reasons companies move money across borders.

International Licensing and Royalties: Companies regularly license intellectual property, like patents, owned by other companies abroad. The use of that IP requires either revenue sharing or the payment of regular royalties, which must either be remitted directly using cross-border payments, or paid to a local subsidiary, which will then use an intra-company payment to repatriate the money.

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B2C: A Small, But Growing Cross-Border Use Case

B2C cross-border payments accounted for roughly $1.6 trillion of total cross-border flows in 2023. Much like small businesses, the rapid digitization of the world has made it much easier for consumers to engage with businesses in other countries. That naturally increases B2C flows, but it also creates opportunities for money to flow back to consumers as well. Since 2019, B2C cross-border payment flows have increased by roughly 33%, second only to C2B growth at 40%.

Why the Money Moves

Marketplace Disbursements: Online marketplaces now make it easier than ever for consumers to sell anything and everything. The top marketplace sites, like eBay, Reverb.com and others, use access to a global customer base as a key differentiator over local listing sites, like Craigslist or Kijiji. In most cases, the marketplace makes international transactions easier by acting as an intermediary, accepting the payment directly from the buyer and then issuing a payout to the seller once delivery is complete. That makes marketplace disbursements B2C by nature.

Gig Economy Disbursements: The global gig economy is driven by online platforms that function as marketplaces for services instead of goods. In 2024, the global gig economy was estimated to be $556.7 billion, with over 16% CAGR expected between 2025 and 2032. As with consumer marketplaces, platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, make engaging gig workers in different countries a frictionless process. Buyers pay the platform in their home currency, and the platform sends out a delayed payment to the service provider upon completion of the work in any currency of their choice.

While it can be argued that gig payouts could be considered B2B flows, these payments are still generally considered B2C due to the “side hustle” nature of many gigs.

Consumer Refunds: Increased international C2B commerce inevitably leads to increased international returns and refunds, which fall under B2C cross-border payment flows.

Insurance Disbursements: Cross-border insurance disbursements are one-time payments where the beneficiary of the payout is in a different country to the insurer. Examples of common cross-border insurance payouts include life insurance benefit payments to family abroad, reimbursements for international medical expenses, and more.

Investment Income: Corporations often have to pay dividends or interest to investors in other countries. While these flows are B2B in cases where the payee is a VC firm or angel investor, payouts to retail stockholders fall under the B2C category.

Key Takeaways

• B2B payments dominate cross-border flows, accounting for over $158 trillion in 2023, driven by international supply chains, service procurement, intra-company transfers, and licensing royalties.

• Diversification of international suppliers is a key trend, especially after pandemic-related disruptions, with many small and medium-sized enterprises expanding global business.

• B2C cross-border payments are growing steadily, reaching $1.6 trillion in 2023, fueled by online marketplaces, the gig economy, consumer refunds, insurance payouts, and investment income.

Part Two: Consumer Cross-Border Payments

Business-initiated transactions represent the largest opportunity in cross-border payments, and companies that find ways to serve business users better stand to be the big winners in the cross-border payments revolution.

But with global commerce now just a few clicks away and annual international income remittances on the rise, consumers also play a big part in the cross-border payments ecosystem. In part two of this series we’ll focus on consumers, including how they move money to businesses and fellow consumers in other countries, and why they’re so important to the future of cross-border payments.

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Payments IQ: Cross Border Payments In 2025 And Beyond | DPIntel

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In a shrinking world where international commerce is the norm and work is borderless, the importance of cross-border payments is increasing rapidly. Yet, in many ways, cross-border payments remain one of the least evolved parts of the modern payments industry. That represents a big problem for the businesses and consumers who use them, and a huge opportunity for the companies developing next-generation solutions.

In this in-depth Payments IQ series report, we’ll examine:

• The current state of how cross-border payments are made and who uses them

• The four key ways today’s cross-border payments fall short

• The opportunity cross-border payments present and the major use cases they can serve

• How technology is shaping the future of cross-border payment flow and how consumers and businesses access them

By the end, you’ll have an up-to-date understanding of the current state of cross-border payments, why they represent such a significant opportunity, and where they’re heading in the years to come.

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Payments Iq Cross Border Payments In 2025 And Beyond | DPIntel

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From small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) paying international suppliers, to workers sending remittances to families back home, to powering the gig economy and beyond, cross-border payments make the world go round.

The total value of global cross-border payments is set to hit $290 billion by 2030, and a large chunk of that volume is up for grabs because the options available today…aren’t great. While the modernization and digitization of cross-border payments is already well under way, they still suffer from four major issues that both consumer and business users universally cite:

• Slow movement of funds from point A to point B

• High fraud risk and poor perceived security

• High costs and a lack of fee transparency

• Unnecessary complexity and difficulty of use

In this article, we’ll take a deeper dive into each of those pain points and analyze where the major issues are, how users are impacted, and what the way forward might look like.

Speed: Today’s Cross-Border Payments are Too Slow

The flow of digital payments is complex by nature, but cross-border payments are worse. A traditional cross-border payment can easily touch four different banks between the sender and recipient, and that journey and the potential hangups at each stop contribute to one of the major pain points for users: speed. A cross-border payment moving through banks can take days to arrive at its end point, especially if there’s a weekend involved.

And users notice.

52% of consumers say cross-border payments are slower than domestic payments, and business users agree, with 32% of SMEs saying it takes too long for funds to be delivered.

Worse still are failed payments that need to be reissued. A third of consumer respondents have had a cross-border payment fail and half of them cited immediate negative impacts, including to their mental well-being. For businesses, a failed cross-border transaction often means a delay in paying an international supplier. That has potentially significant impacts on relationships and important supply chain connections. Globally, 37% of SMEs have run into failed or late payments, including 40% in the United States.

Security: Cross-Border Payments Have a Reputation for Being Risky

34% of consumer respondents say they’ve avoided using cross-border payments because of concerns about fraud. 42% feel that cross-border payments are a higher fraud risk than domestic payments, even though those same respondents were more likely to have personally been victims of domestic payments fraud.

On the business side, fraud is the most cited pain point for SMEs, with 41% saying it’s a concern. While that number is down slightly from a few years ago, the fact that fraud beats out costs is a clear indicator of the reputation cross-border payments carry.

The concerns aren’t without warrant. It’s hard to pin down the exact value of global losses due to cross-border payment fraud, but we know it’s enormous. According to the European Central Bank, cross-border transactions accounted for 63% of card fraud in the Single Euro Payments Area, despite making up just 11% of total card payments. That’s a huge imbalance. And instant options aren’t necessarily any better at the moment, with authorized push payment (APP) fraud out of control in places like the United Kingdom.

Costs: Cross-Border Payments are (Way) Too Expensive

The costs of cross-border payments are a problem for all user types, but they’re especially concerning for businesses. 40% of SMEs say poor FX rates or high fees are a top pain point. In some extreme cases, sending a cross-border payment can cost SMEs ten times more in fees than they’d pay to send the same amount domestically.

Globally, cross-border payment fees average 6.25%, and a staggering 12.10% through banks. That’s way, way too high – especially with extremely low-cost domestic options coming online, like FedNow and other real-time payments systems already in operation around the globe.

But the fees themselves are only the first half of the problem. The other side is that users often don’t understand what they’re paying for. 57% of consumers and 35% of SMBs cite lack of fee transparency or hidden fees as a problem.

Complexity: Users Find Cross-Border Payments More Difficult Than Domestic Payments

Cross-border payments are seen by many users as being too complex – an especially big problem in a world where new tech is increasingly offering consumers simpler, more convenient payment options. Overall, 46% of consumers say it’s harder to make a cross-border payment than a domestic payment.

The Way Forward

It’s clear that cross-border payment providers need to find ways to speed up transactions, lower costs, simplify and secure systems, and increase overall transparency. Legacy systems like wire transfers are not up to the task, so new payments technologies will have to be tapped to bring cross-border payments into the 21st century.

Note: All statistics without specific in-text citations are from the Mastercard Borderless Payments Report 2023.

Originally published on Digital Payments Intelligence at DPIntel.com

Download the free 40-page report Payments IQ: Cross-Border Payments in 2025 and Beyond.

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Introduction:

Customer payment data is a high-value target that makes cyberattackers salivate. Credit card networks, payment processors and merchants go to great lengths to keep it safe, and the latter two face huge penalties and even huger remediation costs for failing to do so. Today, network tokens are emerging as the industry standard processors and merchants turn to for protecting card data and walling off cyber threats, and adoption is skyrocketing.

Network tokens are exploding because they have a lot to offer over the solutions they’re replacing. They provide better security from cyberattacks and fraud – not just for merchants, but for everyone in the payments chain. They offer better authorization approval rates for merchants, which boosts revenue and improves the customer experience. They offer lower interchange rates in many countries. And they offer a new revenue opportunity for payment service providers (PSPs), both through increased residuals on approved transactions and on the fees that can be charged for providing easy-to-sell token management solutions.

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at the network token value proposition, the state of their adoption, and the opportunities their rise presents to both merchants and PSPs.

What are Network Tokens and How Are They Different?

Tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive customer data with a randomly generated data string that contains no sensitive information and is useless to bad actors.

The key piece of data the token replaces is the customer’s Primary Account Number (PAN) – without which credit card fraud is not possible. The token provider stores the customer’s payment data on its own servers and creates tokens to represent it that are unique to each combination of cardholder and merchant. So no two merchants will have the same token even if they’re processing the same card. When a merchant needs to access the customer’s card, it can call the token from its database – known as a token vault – and send it through the network for authorization, processing a payment without ever being exposed to the customer’s card information.

Being able to access card-on-file payments without actually having the card on file is a huge boon for merchants. It enables recurring payments for subscriptions and memberships, one-click signed-in checkouts and more, while freeing the merchant from the threat of expensive data breach remediation.

Network Tokens vs. Payment Tokens

Tokenization is not new, but for many years, most merchants only had access to one type of token – payment tokens issued by processors. These large PSPs took responsibility for storing customer card data and issuing their own secure tokens as a value-added service to offer merchants.

Today, the credit card networks themselves are increasingly providing that service – known as network tokenization. Network tokens are issued directly by the network badged on a cardholder’s credit card, the big four being Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express. The tokens act in the exact same manner as processor payment tokens, but they skip the middleman altogether, simplifying the process and removing one additional data storage point, reducing the attack surface.

The Current State of Network Token Adoption

Network tokens have technically been around for a while, but they were a slow starter up until recently. Today, network tokens are seeing very strong adoption among both merchants and payment service providers (PSPs). According to research from PYMNTS and Mastercard, 78.2% of merchants currently enable tokenization in general, and network tokens have surpassed processor payment tokens in popularity – 28.2% of merchants have opted to go solely with network tokens, versus 17.3% that only offer payment tokens. 32.7% currently offer both, but there’s a good chance that number is going to drift down as more merchants move to network tokens alone.

Merchant-side network token adoption also demonstrates a skew towards larger sellers. Merchants doing over $1 million in revenue per year are much more likely to use network tokens than smaller merchants, 40% of whom have yet to adopt tokenization at all.

On the provider side, network tokens have been almost universally adopted. 88% of PSPs now support network tokenization, with 75% offering it alongside payment tokens and 13% offering it as their only tokenization solution. Those numbers may also trend towards more providers offering only network tokenization as coverage gaps close up and the need for processor payment tokens lessens.

Why Network Tokens are Better Solutions That Will Soon Dominate Tokenization

Network tokenization is already eating into processor-side tokenization. While a small percentage of merchants may opt to use both to ensure complete coverage, the vast majority will only use one or the other.

Network Tokens Take Transaction Security Directly to the Source

The core value proposition of tokenization is security. By replacing the PAN with a unique and non-sensitive piece of data, tokenization walls off bad actors. A hacker could steal a merchant’s entire token vault and it would be completely useless to them because the tokens are randomly generated and can’t be traced back to a PAN in any way. But that is

Network Tokens Reduce PCI Compliance Burden and Liability

Because the card networks also control the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), trusting them with tokenization is an ideal way to minimize both PCI compliance burden and potential liability.

Network Tokens Reduce False Positives and Boost Approval Rates

Network tokens offer two big benefits to transaction approval rates: they’re highly trustworthy and they automatically update.

Network Tokens Offer Better Interchange Rates

The major card networks want merchants to use their network tokenization solutions, and they financially incentivize them to do so through interchange rates. In some cases, discounts are offered. Visa, for instance, sets interchange fees as much as 10 basis points (0.1%) lower for network tokenized transactions in certain countries, including the U.S. and Canada.

What It All Means for Payment Service Providers and Merchants

Ultimately, network tokens are likely to become the baseline standard for transaction security and the vast majority of merchants will use them. In the meantime, the availability of this enhanced tokenization solution has some big implications for both merchants and their processing partners.

Better Security and More Money Now Go Hand in Hand

The main selling point for merchants is that network tokens offer them better security

There is No Time for PSPs to Hesitate on Adopting and Offering Network Tokens

For service providers, network tokens offer the same benefits, but from a slightly different angle. On the security side, merchants utilizing network tokens are less susceptible to fraud, the losses from which ultimately impact the service provider. That means PSPs benefit from having their merchants on network tokens. That’s one reason PSPs may choose to pass the savings on interchange through to merchants. But, they don’t have to.

Originally posted on Digital Payments Intelligence, at DPIntel.com.