American Express today announced the launch of its American Express Token Service, a suite of products designed to enable its card-issuing partners, processors, acquirers and merchants to create a safer online and mobile payments environment for consumers.

With American Express Token Service, traditional card account numbers are replaced with unique “tokens,” which can then be used to complete payment transactions online, in a mobile app or in-store with a mobile Near Field Communication-enabled device.

By using tokens, merchants and digital wallet operators eliminate the need to store consumers' sensitive account information in their systems. Moreover, tokens can be assigned for use with a specific merchant, transaction type or payment device to provide further protection against fraud.

Based on the EMVCo Payment Tokenization Specification and Technical Framework published earlier this year, American Express Token Service provides the following for card-issuing financial institutions:

• a token vault to store and map tokens to card account numbers;
• the ability to issue tokens;
• lifecycle management services in order to create, suspend, resume or delete tokens; and
• additional fraud and risk management services, such as authorization and payment data validation capabilities.
• American Express Token Service is available in the U.S.; international rollout is expected to begin in 2015.

"We believe our payments network is a tremendous asset to American Express — one that will allow us to offer our customers new features and technologies to meet their evolving spending needs," said Paul Fabara, president of global banking and global network business at American Express. "As we move ahead, we are excited to bring these new capabilities to our customers and look forward to continuing to serve them."

American Express also announced that it has developed network specifications for Host Card Emulation, according to the announcement. The company's HCE specifications provide card-issuing partners with additional security options and solutions for payments made with mobile NFC-enabled devices that support Android OS KitKat.

With HCE, card issuers use a secure cloud server to store their customers' card account details, which can be transmitted from the cloud server to an NFC-enabled mobile device and then to a point-of-sale terminal. American Express' HCE specifications are available today globally.