Truecaller starts storing its entire Indian user data locally

New Delhi: After complying with Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) norms on data localization pertaining to its payments data, the Swedish caller identification app, Truecaller on Wednesday said that its entire Indian user data is now hosted in India. This makes Truecaller one of the first international technology companies to proactively take the step of storing its Indian users’ data locally in India.

The move is a user-centric move that is aimed at safeguarding personal data and encouraging more transparency in the ecosystem, said the company in a statement.

“All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India. This data should include the full end-to-end transaction details/information collected/carried/processed as part of the message/payment instruction,” RBI said in its 6 April 2018 circular.

It said for the overseas part of the transaction, the data may be stored in a foreign country.

RBI issued the directive for better monitoring of transaction data. It gave the companies six months to abide and submit their compliance report by 15 October.

According to Truecaller, it had already started storing its Indian user’s payments data of its unified payment interface (UPI) based payment service in India when mandated by the RBI.

“ Payments as a vertical was built from scratch entirely out of India last year after the acquisition of the Indian payments start-up Chillr. This made Truecaller fully compliant to RBI’s data localisation norms from the start, compared to other international entities,” the statement added.

Unlike Truecaller, most of the major payment companies had expressed concerns over the new norms and sought a relaxation of rules on storing data on older transactions from the central bank.

“This is one of the many steps we are taking to ensure better quality of our core services across payments, messaging and Caller ID features that Truecaller offers. This also safeguards our user’s privacy and is our way of showing commitment towards our users and their data while being compliant with laws of the geographies we operate in,” Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Truecaller said.

Truecaller claims to have around 250 million users globally, including more than 150 million in India.