Card payments company Visa has launched a feature that allows users to carry out online transactions without the need to punch in the cardholder verification value (CVV), if the card has been tokenized.

The CVV-free feature launched in India is aimed at making the online transaction process smoother.

The merchants who adopt this will not have to ask customers for their CVV every time they do a domestic transaction. They will be verifying this three-digit number on the back of the card only once, at the time of tokenizing the card.

Tokenization masks the card details with a unique code, making the transactions more secure. Tokenized transactions are two-factor authenticated, one at the time of tokenization and later at the time of putting the OTP.

Tokenization removes the need for a customer to put details such as the 16-digit debit or credit card number, CVV and the expiry date at merchant websites every time the person makes a transaction. It secures the user from cyber frauds, as online merchants don’t save the card data of customers but only the tokens. Also, the same token cannot be used on other merchant platforms.

“Tokenization is being adopted in the mainstream ecommerce space well. We now want to make the payment experience faster and more friction-free by removing the CVV. What we are saying now is that in a tokenized card transaction, the role of a CVV is limited and we are working with the industry to remove it,” Ramakrishnan Gopalan, head of products, India and South Asia at Visa.

Visa’s new product comes at a time when the card major has paused ‘Visa Safe Click’, its single-click checkout service for online transactions, as the Reserve Bank of India continues to push payment players to tighten their security standards.