Abstract: Systems and methods for on-demand tokenization of data. Sensitive data elements are tokenized according to a standardized approach, with the resulting token being, or incorporating, a universally unique identifier (UUID). Each payload-token mapping is stored in a distributed key-value database, with the input payload serving as the basis for the key and the generated token stored as the value. The distributed key-value database is accessible to systems within a trusted environment, and also to authorized external applications via a tokenization API service, allowing a variety of applications to request tokenization in real-time, and their data sets to be cross-correlatable.