The push provisioning concept: How to push cards to mobile wallets, merchants and wearables

Let’s begin with a brief introduction to push provisioning and why this is relevant…

Since the implementation of EMV-based payment tokens by Visa and Mastercard through their respective token platforms, the list of token requestors (a.k.a digital wallets) has grown substantially. Cardholders today can add their cards to several third-party digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Netflix and similar.

A cardholder who adds a card manually through the digital wallet interface (e.g. a mobile app) will require all involved parties (wallet provider, scheme, issuer, and the cardholder) to follow up with a more tedious and time-consuming verification process to ensure that the “card add” is legit and requested by the real cardholder.

A manual process of adding a card directly through the wallet interface may lead to a higher threshold for the cardholder to engage. Reasons could be less trust in the system, worrying about making mistakes, and failure to follow up on the required step-up ID&V process.

The push provisioning concept is here to remedy this to boost the card issuance to digital wallets by making it simpler, faster, and more trustworthy for the cardholder. The push provisioning concept provides the card issuers with a tool that allows them to push their card on top of multiple wallets and the wallet providers a new channel to acquire new customers.

Our Mea Push Provisioning platform (shortened MPP) enables card issuers, program managers and fintech companies to provide their cardholders with a list of all available digital wallets together with a one-click instant issuance experience directly through the issuer’s mobile app or website.

The MPP platform enables:

• Secure and effortless experience for cardholders to connect their cards with digital wallets and eCommerce merchants, by
  • Providing a list of trusted and certified digital wallets and merchants available to accept “card push”
  • One-click issuance experience through the card issuer’s own trusted channels
  • Very fast and error-free process managed without the need for cardholder step-up authentication

• Support for all certified wallets within days, by
  • Providing a service that is live and used by multiple institutions, tips and best practices, eliminating the customer’s need to spend time and effort on analysis and implementation
  • Fully managed backend service that includes integration, maintenance, cryptographic keys, and managing PCI data
  • Providing the service through APIs/SDKs and dev guides that reduces the implementation time from several man-months to a few man-hours

So how does it work in general?

The Mea Push Provisioning platform removes the unnecessary part that involves implementing and maintaining all the different combinations of schemes and wallet requirements. It provides the issuer’s developers with a clean and straightforward agnostic interface that hides away the complexity of qualifying the push request and constructing the digital payloads to be sent to the selected digital wallets. The solution supports the whole process which can roughly be divided into five parts:

1. Generate the list of available wallets

The first step is to get a list of available wallets that can be presented to the cardholder within the app or website, so the cardholder may browse through wallets and merchants he can add his cards.

2. Decide if the card is added to the wallet already

This is an important check to make before any instant card issuance can take place. The mobile app or website must know if the card, that is currently viewed by the cardholder, is already added to the selected wallet(s) or not. In other words; qualifying the push to decide if to show the “Add to wallet” button or show a message saying something like “the card is already added”.

3. Provide the card data to be pushed

The next step is to get the card details of the card that is to be pushed to the wallet. The MPP solution supports mainly two secure ways to receive this card data; through a backend-to-backend transfer or via the mobile client.

4. Fetch needed data and build the payloads and cryptograms

This part happens behind the scenes by the MPP core. It includes fetching data such as card data, wallet IDs, token requestor IDs and apply the required logic to build the payload and the pre-authorized values to be sent to the digital wallets.

5. Push the “digital card” to the digital wallet

The last step is to push the payloads to the targeted mobile wallet. This push of data is done e.g. on the mobile phone through app-to-app communication or cross devices. The receiving wallet will take over from here and function as a token requestor towards the scheme token service provider.

Step 5 results in an active card added to the wallet. The cardholder will be directed back to the issuer interface, and should now see his card added and in an active state within the wallet

We hope this blog post helps you get the idea of push provisioning and how we can help.