According to Bloomberg, the US Department of Justice is looking into Visa’s practices of penalizing retailers for not using its proprietary tokenization technology.
The investigation was launched more than two years after the antitrust division of the DoJ started looking into whether Visa had restricted businesses’ ability to send debit transactions through less expensive networks. The Justice Department recently settled a tokenization dispute with MasterCard, a competitor of Visa.
Tokenization, which Visa first implemented nine years ago, replaces the 16-digit account number with a token that can only be unlocked by the payments giant in order to protect cardholder information.
Read More: Visa faces DoJ probe into tokenisation technology pricing
