Visa Europe today announced the expansion of the Visa Europe Payment Tokenisation Service to enable financial institutions and others to integrate tokenization into a variety of payment methods, including cloud-based mobile payments, retailer-specific checkout offerings and card-on-file payment options as commonly used by leading online retailers and merchants.

"People throughout Europe are encountering innovative new technologies that offer fast and frictionless ways to pay wherever, whenever and on whatever device they choose," said Sandra Alzetta, executive director of product enablement for Visa Europe. "By 2020, our projections are for one in five consumers to pay for items using their smartphone on a daily basis and for payments on mobile or tablet to account for more than 50 percent of Visa transactions. Looking at contactless as an early indicator, where adoption has doubled and spend has trebled in the last year, we believe this projection could well be a conservative estimate."

The company said in a press release that the move widens Visa Europe's existing support for mobile payment that rely on tokenized information within a mobile device. Tokenization is a random series if numbers that replaces the traditional 16-digit account number linked to a payment card.