Come July 1, merchants, payment aggregators, payment gateways and acquiring banks can no longer store the card details of customers. Businesses and other entities that have stored any such data will have to purge them and apply tokenization. All debit and credit card holders must take a note that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has legislated the introduction of tokenisation of card transactions, with a deadline of June 30, 2022.
Ravi Battula, Vice President – Merchant Acquiring Business, Wibmo – A PayU Company said that any major payment system like India should enable safe, quick and affordable digital payments. He added while the payments are getting quicker, faster and affordable safety at scale still remains an opportunity to be beefed up to drive the adoption of digital payments further.
“From a security standpoint if not implemented well. Tokenization ensures standardization for such card on file transactions through higher security standards which is irreversible as compared to existing reversible cryptographic standards,” said Ravi Battula.
Post June, there would be some disruptions in the ecosystem as any new change will cause some friction in such massive payment system built over time. "In the long run, tokenization will ensure greater security for any recurring subscription payments initiated by customer or merchant with greater customer controls to see list of merchants where the card is stored and ability to delete, suspend the subscription if needed,”Battula further added.
A tokenized card transaction is considered safer as the actual card details are not shared with the merchant during transaction processing. For transaction tracking and reconciliation purposes, entities can store the last four digits of the card number and the card issuer’s name. The customer’s consent and OTP-based authentication are required for creating a token.
The first RBI deadline to tokenize the card details was June 30, 2021. But at the request of merchants and payment aggregators, as well as card companies and banks, it was extended to December 31, 2021. And the deadline was again extended by six months. The deadline for credit, debit card tokenisation is June 30, 2022.
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