MasterCard Inc. has announced that it will include tokenization in its MasterPass digital wallet.

And that means one thing: Apple has rocked the payments world.

It is Apple Pay, launched just last October, that is perpetuating tokenization, and MasterCard — the payments behemoth — has noticed.

Ajay Banga, MC’s CEO, said this about tokenization yesterday:

It’s a very important aspect of where we’re going for safety and security. Apple Pay was the first version of that to come out. We’re putting it into MasterPass, just regular MasterPass over the next few–period of time … You’ll see in a year or two’s time, tokenization will become kind of fiddlesticks in the game on e-commerce.

But this seismic shift in payments is going to come at a hefty price. MasterCard disclosed yesterday that its total operating expenses climbed 26% on a year-over-year basis to $1.4 billion. A portion of that increase came from “spend around our Apple Pay and Priceless initiatives, as well as continuing our digital investments such as MasterPass and tokenization, similar to prior quarters,” Banja said.

However, Banja made it clear that MasterCard sees little choice but to play along. He said that NFC and tokenization are in “a two- or three-year cycle of a fairly dramatic increase in contactless-equipped terminals” around the world. And don’t think for a moment that MasterCard is going to miss that market shift.