NFC Times Exclusive – Visa has taken a more aggressive approach than Mastercard to ending support for alternate PANs, which it considers an impediment to its ultimate goal of converting all Visa-branded cards loaded onto smartphones and other devices to tokens complying with the EMVCo tokenization framework–preferably using its own Visa Token Service.
Alternate PANs, sometimes called virtual cards, are separate card account numbers that a number of banks, especially in Europe, have been issuing from their existing BINs to help secure their HCE mobile payments services. The banks consider alternate PANs as their own form of tokenization, which they can fully control and which could keep their mobile transactions off the major networks. That would be an important consideration for banks with a significant number of on-us transactions, in which the bank both issues and acquires the transactions.