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Comment by fpgeek | Hacker News Reader

> But what's more, tokenization removes a huge storage burden from merchants, since they never see a person's actual credit card information and it never enters their POS system or online payment portal.

Yes, merchants think that getting additional customer-identifying information that forces them to run extra analyses on the mountains of transaction data they warehouse is a huge burden they'd like to be relieved of.

</sarcasm>

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Don't most of them use loyalty cards for that purpose anyways?

Target's data http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/11/targ... showed showed that customer visits, sales and profits decreased significantly following the breach. They would probably be happy to offload that nightmare onto somebody else.

As I understand it, retailers use loyalty cards to improve their customer-level data and as a way to act on that data (e.g. targeted coupons), but even the baseline they can extract without loyalty cards is very important to them.

In fact, even after last year's breach, Target clearly isn't happy offloading that nightmare. They're currently teting CurrentC: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2014/11/10/...

With a CC you don't get that much data since there's no relation between CC number (the one you store) and a customers data (address, age, gender). That's why they invented loyalty cards.

We're talking about brick&mortar retailers, online is different since you (may) ask all this data before any payment.

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