Visa and MasterCard have signed an agreement intended to accelerate the adoption of tokens in Visa Checkout and Masterpass, the companies' respective digital wallets.

The reciprocal tokenization agreement enables Visa to request tokenized MasterCard payment credentials from MasterCard for provisioning to Visa Checkout, and for MasterCard to request tokenized Visa credentials from Visa for provisioning to Masterpass.

"By allowing each network's respective wallet service to leverage the token solutions of the other network, this agreement will ensure that each network's wallet solutions can continue to stay open — and can add the extra security of using tokens in place of real card numbers," James Anderson, group executive for platforms in the emerging payments division at MasterCard, wrote in a blog post about the announcement.