The Clearing House and MasterCard are partnering to enable the former to provision and manage MasterCard-branded tokens on behalf of banks, according to a press release.

The partnership with MasterCard establishes The Clearing House as one of the first MasterCard-certified third-party token service providers to enter the U.S. market and enables The Clearing House to support current and future token capabilities ranging from mobile payments to remote purchases and Internet-of-Things transactions.

The Clearing House has been a long time participant in tokenization. Its tokenization product conforms with the card industry's EMVCo framework and fully complies with the MasterCard Token Service Provider Standards, which were initially published in August 2016.  

This agreement paves the way for The Clearing House to offer fully compliant tokens that transact over the MasterCard network. The partnership builds on MasterCard's desire to support a robust token ecosystem and enable issuer optionality for services, according to the press release.

"The safety and security of payments is paramount to TCH and our owner banks, and was a core rationale for our initial token work stemming back several years," said Dave Fortney, executive vice president of product development and strategy at The Clearing House, in the release. "We are excited to partner with MasterCard to provide issuer optionality and functionality for token services."