Mastercard is doubling down on efforts to eliminate the use of credit card numbers when customers make purchases online in a bid to fight fraud.A decade after it first unveiled a technology that replaces consumers’ card numbers with so-called tokens, the company is now processing 1 billion such transactions every week, Chief Executive Officer Michael Miebach said in an interview. That’s after it took the payments behemoth three years to process the first billion of such transactions.Now, Mastercard is planning to expand the use of the technology to replace security measures like passwords with biometric data such as fingerprints or face scans, Miebach said. It’s the latest step that the financial industry is taking to combat the rising issue of online payment fraud, which is expected to exceed $91 billion by 2028.A decade ago, the common thinking was “if you want to keep it safe, protect data and protect transactions through passwords,” Miebach said at Mastercard’s London offices. “That worked for a while. And then it started to become the vulnerability instead of effective safety and security.”“The source of the problem was that if the data was exposed and somebody penetrated and got into that data, they could use it,” Miebach said. “The digital economy - what is the one thing that’s holding it back? It’s the risk of data breaches of fraud and so forth. And tokenization is a big lever to curb those.”Mastercard has said it expects all e-commerce transactions to be tokenized in Europe by the end of the decade. The partner of Fintech section is Tweet Views 10109