The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has decided to defer the implementation of tokenisation of debit and credit cards for online transactions by a further six months following representations from stakeholders.
“The timeline for storing of CoF data [actual card data] is extended by six months till June 30, 2022; post this, such data shall be purged,” the central bank said on Thursday.
“In addition to tokenisation, industry stakeholders may devise alternate mechanism(s) to handle any use case (including recurring e-mandates, EMI option) or post-transaction activity (including chargeback handling, dispute resolution, reward/loyalty programme) that currently involves/requires storage of CoF data by entities other than card issuers and card networks,” the RBI said in a circular to Payment System Providers and system participants.
Earlier, the RBI had via a circular on “Guidelines on Regulation of Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways” dated March 17, 2020, barred the authorised non-bank payment aggregators and merchants onboarded by them from storing card data (CoF) with effect from June 30, 2021.
