Beyond the Firewall: Rethinking Payment Data Security: By James Richardson

Finextra

18-06-2025

In today's digital economy, protecting sensitive business payment data is no longer just the responsibility of IT or treasury departments — it's a strategic business imperative. While enterprise systems like ERP and CRM often have strong security protocols, these systems don't operate in a vacuum. Payment data is frequently copied, stored, and used across spreadsheets, shared drives, and supplier portals — far beyond the safety of core systems. That's where the real risk lies.
Why Traditional Defences Fall Short
Historically, businesses have relied on layered security controls like encryption, firewalls, and access policies to protect payment information. But these measures alone don't eliminate the inherent risks of decentralised data.
Payment details often reside in multiple locations across an organisation — from shared folders to manual payment files — making it hard to track who has access, where data is stored, and how it's being used. In these uncontrolled environments, human error, system design gaps, and cybercriminals can easily exploit weaknesses.
And the stakes are high. Data breaches involving bank account details not only damage reputations and erode customer trust but can also expose organisations to direct financial loss, fraud recovery efforts, and regulatory scrutiny.
The Rise of Payment Tokenisation
To address this growing threat, an additional and effective approach is gaining traction in B2B payments security: payment tokenisation.
Tokenisation replaces sensitive bank account information with a secure, randomised token — a placeholder with no exploitable value. These tokens are stored and managed outside the business's systems, in highly secure external environments. The original bank data stays protected, while the business uses the token for processing payments as if it were the real thing.
In practice, this means organisations can continue to run payments efficiently — but without ever holding the real account data internally. Even if a breach occurs, attackers get meaningless tokens rather than actionable payment credentials.
Strategic Benefits Beyond Security
The appeal of tokenisation goes beyond protecting against fraud. It simplifies compliance and risk management by centralising sensitive data into a single, tightly controlled location. That eliminates data sprawl, reduces audit complexity, and gives finance teams greater peace of mind.
Organisations embracing tokenisation also gain operational resilience. Instead of relying solely on internal controls, they reduce systemic risk by shifting sensitive data management to dedicated, security-hardened infrastructure. That's especially valuable for large businesses managing thousands of payments a day or navigating complex multi-supplier networks.
From Niche to Necessity
While tokenisation is already well established in card payment systems, its adoption for bank account data is only just beginning. There's no regulatory requirement — yet — but that's starting to shift. Standards like PCI DSS don't currently mandate tokenisation for bank details, but forward-thinking organisations aren't waiting for legislation to catch up.
Rising fraud, evolving cyber threats, and increasing expectations from partners and regulators are all pushing tokenisation from a niche solution to a best-practice standard. For financial operations teams, it's a proactive step that protects both reputation and revenue.
The Strategic Imperative
Tokenisation isn't just a cybersecurity tactic — it's a smarter, more resilient way to handle business payment data in a landscape where breaches are inevitable and reputational risk is high. It streamlines compliance, enhances governance, and dramatically lowers the threat posed by internal errors, third-party risks, and increasingly sophisticated attacks.
The time to act is now. Businesses that wait for regulation, a major breach, or a mandate from a banking partner are already on the back foot. Forward-looking organisations are proactively removing sensitive bank account data from their systems — not simply to protect it, but to eliminate the need to hold it in the first place.
Don't wait for a crisis to rethink your approach. Tokenisation is fast becoming a defining feature of modern payment security strategy. If your business handles payments, it's time to ask: why hold the risk at all?