Work Payments
Network tokenization across four card networks
Led the architecture and delivery of one tokenization platform across Visa VTS, Mastercard MDES and SCOF, Discover Tokenization and Amex DDX, then owned it as Engineering Manager.
- Role
- Technical Lead, then Engineering Manager
- Organisation
- Pagos Solutions, Inc.
- When
- 2021 – 2025
The problem
When a merchant charges a stored card, the issuer sees a raw card number it can’t tie to the customer’s device or history, and approvals suffer. Each card network runs its own token service — Visa Token Service, Mastercard MDES, Discover Tokenization and Amex DDX — with its own onboarding, certification and lifecycle rules. Merchants want one integration that works across all four.
My role
- As Technical Lead (2021–2023), I led the architecture and delivery of network tokenization across the four networks.
- As Engineering Manager (2023–2025), I owned the platform with a distributed backend, data and DevOps team, and ran onboarding and certification directly with Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex.
What the team delivered
- One tokenization platform covering Visa VTS, Mastercard MDES and SCOF, Discover Tokenization and Amex DDX.
- Certification with each network, run directly with the networks.
- Weekly releases on Terraform and GitHub Actions, with on-call, SLOs and post-incident reviews, inside the company’s PCI DSS and SOC 2 controls.
Outcome
The team’s work contributed to a 5–7.5% improvement in card-not-present approval rates through network tokenization across all four major card networks.
Ownership
The platforms belong to Pagos and were built by its engineering team, which I led. Pagos engaged me full-time, contracted through my company, which also placed one engineer on the team.