Simplified explanation of how a credit card transaction occurs tracking payments from the consumer to the merchant to the banks and credit card companies. If PCI compliace is important to your company this is part of a great PCI training tool. Payment card industry (PCI) compliance standards require merchants and other businesses to handle credit card information in a secure manner that helps reduce the likelihood that cardholders would have sensitive financial data stolen. If merchants do not handle credit card information properly, the card information could be hacked and used to make fraudulent purchases. Additionally, sensitive information about the cardholder could be used in identity fraud. Tokenization is a technology solution that intercepts credit card numbers entered into any enterprise payment acceptance system or environment, and replaces credit card numbers with a surrogate value or token. The encrypted card number is stored off-site in a Transarmor secure, PCI-compliant data vault. This token is used just as if it were the real card to support customer requests and facilitates reporting without interrupting day-to-day operations. By capturing and tokenizing cardholder information prior to the raw card data touching the source system, merchants no longer handle or store unsecured cardholder data on-site, but instead store tokens.