NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Visa maintains that its offer to waive tokenization fees for the long term is designed to simplify the connections between thousands of card issuers and such wallet providers as Google and, perhaps later, Apple, thus driving widespread rollouts of mobile-payments services.

But the offer for “free” tokenization from Visa and a similar deal expected from MasterCard Worldwide has observers–especially companies planning to offer their own tokenization services–questioning the strategy behind the moves by the networks, with one prospective competing token service provider calling the offers by Visa and MasterCard a “Trojan horse” for substantial fees down the road. 

Most industry observers agree the stakes are high as the tokenization landscape takes shape, since tokens are expected to be used extensively in rollouts of mobile payments globally over the next several years.