American Express Token Service vs Purse Vault

American Express Token Service replaces a card’s primary account number with a payment token for online and mobile commerce. It includes a token vault, token issuance and provisioning, lifecycle management, and risk management. Tokens are surrogate values that can be restricted by retailer, number of uses, lifetime, and other variables, and follow EMVCo Payment Tokenization specifications. During provisioning, issuers can assess whether a card is active, suspected of fraud, eligible for tokenization, and belongs to the card member requesting the token. Lifecycle management can keep tokens current when cards are replaced, reducing manual updates to stored payment details. Listed uses include card-on-file payments, Click to Pay, digital wallets, virtual cards, browser autofill virtual card numbers, and digital or numberless cards. The service is cloud-based and supports payment cards, card-on-file credentials, digital wallets, wearables, Click to Pay, and QR code payments. Pricing is on request; the listed plan is free, with no deployment or use fees stated. Availability varies by market and enablement is required.

Purse Vault is a cloud payment-orchestration service that sits between merchants and their selected payment-service providers (PSPs). Its independent vault stores card data and supports moving payment methods between providers. Centralized tokens can support transaction retries or routing to a partner in real time. Purse also consolidates orders, settlements, fees, transfers, and chargebacks, and standardizes PSP transaction logs. Dashboards organize payment information by country, PSP, or payment method, including acceptance rates and decline reasons. One technical integration connects to more than 100 PSPs and local or international payment methods; the catalog lists more than 80 providers and methods. Purse says it will integrate a partner outside its catalog within 25 working days. The Vault is PCI DSS v4 Level 1 certified and hosted on sovereign infrastructure in Europe. SecureFields collects card details in secure iframes and returns a vault_form_token without PAN or CVV reaching merchant systems. Pricing is on request.