Back to blog

How Givebacks protects your credit card information with tokenization

April 4, 2023

How Givebacks protects your credit card information with tokenization

With the popularity of online shopping, most of us have gotten used to entering our credit card information to complete a purchase. But with so many stories of identity theft and credit card fraud out there, it’s understandable if you’re concerned about the security of your data and personal information. 

That’s why Givebacks and many other companies who care about their users’ security use a process called tokenization to protect all sensitive payment data. 

For those curious about how tokenization works, read on. We’ll explain it in easy-to-understand terms, talk about the differences between tokenization vs. encryption, and share how we use TokenEx to protect your payment information.

Does Givebacks store my credit card information?

Nope! Thanks to tokenization, we don’t receive or store your bank account, payment card, or online payment service credentials on any systems that we operate. 

How does tokenization work?

Tokenization simply means that rather than storing your actual name, credit card details, address, and other personal information,  a “token” is stored instead. This is a randomized string of numbers and letters. Because everyone is assigned a unique token, you are able to make future purchases without your credit card information being stored by Givebacks. This means you can safely power donations whenever you make purchases online, on your phone, or in-store at participating stores and restaurants!

Because details are stored securely with TokenEx, no payment information is stored by Givebacks. This means that if somehow someone were to hack into our system, no sensitive data would be revealed. They would not have access to any of your information and would just get a useless string of numbers and letters (take that, hackers!). 

What is TokenEx?

At Givebacks, we specifically use a data protection platform called TokenEx to protect your payment data. TokenEx is a data protection platform that combines encryption and tokenization to provide a powerful, layered security architecture that significantly reduces the risk of data theft.

If you’d like a more technical answer to the question, “how does tokenization work?” check out this information on the TokenEx website

Tokenization vs. encryption: What’s the difference?

The primary difference—and benefit—of using tokenization in addition to encryption is that tokenized data cannot be returned to its original form. Randomized generation is key to how tokenization works. Tokenized data can not be deciphered, while with encryption, data can be decrypted and returned to its original form.

***

So there you have it! We hope this helped you get a solid understanding of how tokenization works, the difference between tokenization vs. encryption, why Givebacks uses TokenEx, and how we protect your sensitive payment information using tokenization. Now, when you set up your Givebacks account and add a credit card to your wallet, you can rest assured that not only are you helping a cause you care about, but your payment data is secured by tokenization, too!