The Reserve Bank of India extended the deadline for controlling payment aggregators and payment gateways to June 30, 2021 on Thursday. This means that customers will no longer have to enter their credit card information every time they order something from an e-commerce platform, and merchants such as Amazon and Flip will continue to save customers’ credit card information until June 30, 2022.
According to an official notification issued by the RBI today declared “Guidelines on Regulation of Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways,” authorised non-bank payment aggregators and merchants on-boarded by them are prohibited from storing card data (CoF) beginning June 30, 2021. This deadline was extended to December 31, 2021, at the request of industry stakeholders.”
“In light of various representations received in this regard, we advise as follows, the timeline for storing CoF data is extended by six months, i.e., until June 30, 2022; following this, such data shall be purged,” it said.
The RBI also advises industry stakeholders to develop an alternative mechanism for this purpose. “Industry stakeholders may devise alternate mechanism(s) to handle any use or post-transaction activity that currently involves/requires the storage of CoF data by entities other than card issuers and card networks,” the document stated.
Previously, in March 2020, the RBI issued guidelines prohibiting merchants from saving customers’ card details in order to improve security. The regulatory body updated its guidelines on card tokenisation services in September of this year in order to improve safety and security. ” Beginning in July 2022, customers will be unable to save their debit or credit card information on any e-commerce platform.” Every time they conduct an online transaction, they will be required to re-enter the details of their debit or credit card.
Customers will not be charged an additional fee for card tokenization, and card tokenization is not required. Customers can choose to tokenize their cards for faster transactions or enter card information manually..