Case Study Financial Services
Securing 400M+ customer records for a Fortune 500 financial leader.
One of the oldest U.S. credit reporting agencies secured its sensitive data and achieved PCI compliance for a Visa project using Protegrity’s Privacy Protect solution. By deploying enterprise-ready vaultless tokenization, the agency safeguarded sensitive credit card data, reduced compliance complexity, and enabled future analytics projects.
400M+
Customer Records
180B
Credit Card Numbers
300M
Tokens Per Minute
100%
PCI Compliant
01 / The Challenge
Fragmented data environments and looming regulatory deadlines.
The organization faced the daunting task of securing sensitive cardholder data for a critical Visa project across deeply entrenched legacy mainframes and distributed cloud environments. This friction threatened to stall innovation while exposing the business to immense regulatory risk under FCRA, FACTA, GLBA, and PCI DSS.
Mainframe Bottlenecks
Existing systems lacked the processing power to encrypt massive data volumes at scale. Traditional encryption caused severe performance degradation, jeopardizing the 300M+ daily transaction volume.
PCI DSS & Federal Mandates
The firm faced strict, non-negotiable deadlines to achieve comprehensive PCI DSS compliance across all environments, while concurrently adhering to strict FCRA, FACTA, and GLBA requirements.
Stalled Analytics Initiatives
Critical analytical workloads involving sensitive data could not move forward due to strict privacy, regulatory, and internal security policy requirements surrounding raw PII.
02 / The Strategy
Format-preserving tokenization across the entire data lifecycle.
By implementing Protegrity’s vaultless tokenization, the firm neutralized data risk globally. Tokens replaced sensitive cardholder information while preserving the original format, allowing legacy databases and cloud analytics to operate normally without exposing actual data.
Vaultless Tokenization
Eliminated the need for massive, high-latency token vaults, allowing sub-millisecond encryption and decryption directly at the application layer.
Zero App Rewrites
Format-preserving methods meant legacy databases did not require schema changes, saving millions in developer hours and testing.
Centralized Policy
A single pane of glass provided granular, role-based access control governing who could view plaintext data versus tokens globally.
Analytics-Ready Protection
Enabled analytics teams to work with tokenized data while preserving privacy, policy control, and data utility.
It has been a massive success. We deployed enterprise-wide without disrupting a single downstream process, entirely satisfying our security, regulatory, and contractual requirements.
Chief Information Security Officer
03 / The Impact
Accelerating the business while hardening the perimeter.
Business Outcomes
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100% PCI Compliance achieved across all hybrid environments, passing rigorous external audits with zero findings.
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Unlocked Secure Analytics: Enabled future analytics projects on protected data without exposing sensitive values.
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Accelerated Time-to-Market: Security is no longer a bottleneck for deploying new customer-facing applications.
Technical Excellence
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Maintained sub-10ms processing latency across billions of global transactions.
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Reduced infrastructure overhead significantly by eliminating the need for bulky, stateful token vaults.
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Standardized enterprise security onto a single platform, deprecating fragmented legacy encryption tools.
04 / The Advantage
Simplifying compliance and scaling security.
Protegrity helped the financial institution move from fragmented data protection to a consistent, high-performance security model across legacy and modern environments.
Before Protegrity Implementation
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Sensitive data within PCI scope increased compliance complexity and operational cost.
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Internally developed tokenization solutions failed to meet the required performance standard of 300 million tokens per minute..
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Manual processes for managing sensitive data hindered scalability and delayed analytics initiatives.
With Protegrity
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Vaultless Tokenization
Protected sensitive data at the source while reducing PCI scope and preserving operational speed.
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Performance at Scale
The high-performance architecture securely generated 300 million tokens per minute, meeting the agency’s demanding operational requirements.
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Preserved Data Utility
Tokenized data retained its original type and format, enabling seamless analytics and reporting without compromising security.
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Centralized Control
The Enterprise Security Administrator provided centralized policy enforcement, key management, auditing, and strict separation of duties.