The Challenge
In early 2020, seeing the rapid development of tokenization services worldwide and the expansion of OEM wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay, our client wanted to offer such services to local customers in Uzbekistan as well. Unfortunately, the Uzbekistani market at the time was not a priority for Google Pay and Apple Pay and these OEM wallet service providers had no plans of expanding to Uzbekistan for the foreseeable future.
Moreover, our client processes domestic card operations with the National Interbank Payment System (NIPC) differently than the foreign ones. Therefore, it most likely wouldn’t be possible to tokenize domestic cards. It also won’t be possible to distribute them to Apple Pay and other OEM wallets.
For this reason, our client decided to build a fully autonomous cloud-based tokenization service of their own. This cloud-based tokenization service would generate, store, and manage tokens issued for all domestic cards in the country. It would also serve other banks in the country, much like Visa VTS or Mastercard MDES does.
Solution We Offered
One of the distinct advantages of the Tokenization Platform is the CBP module, which allows domestic networks to build their tokenization services in their domestic markets. There are only a few vendors in the world who offer systems with such features, and since D8 Corporation is one of them, our client chose to work with D8 as the company that already has a strong presence in Central Asia.
D8 Corporation offered a Tokenization Platform with CMS connectors, a Tokenization engine, and Issuer Wallet connectors included. Within the Tokenization engine, Token Service Provider (TSP) and Cloud-Based Payments (CBP) components are tightly integrated, because our client is the sole tokenization service provider that is responsible for handling all token lifecycle requests and at the same time is the centralized token issuer and storage vault (roles that in international payment network implementations are played by Visa VTS and Mastercard MDES services).
Our client uses a set of API interfaces that come with a CMS connectors module to provide subscription access to tokenization service for all banks in Uzbekistan that issue domestic cards and want to tokenize them in the system.
The Issuer Wallet connectors module is used for connecting different banks to the service by integrating the Issuer Wallet SDK into each bank’s mobile banking app. As of 2022, 23 banks already integrated SDKs into their mobile apps and are connected to our client’s CBTS system.
The Results
- Successfully launched a national-scale CBTS
- 23+ banks onboarded in 3 months
- Fully fledged alternative to global wallets
- Possibility for launching other value-added services in the future
