The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) originally set a date of December 31, 2021 for all payment card data to be tokenized. As it became obvious that date would not be met by most, it has been extended to June 30, 2022:
“A new step towards enhancing the security of payment ecosystem has been taken by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) with its guidelines on mandating payment networks tokenization in the country now extended to June 30, 2022 from the earlier deadline of December 31, 2021. According to RBI’s circular, only banks and networks will be allowed to store customers’ card data. This includes e-commerce use cases as well (so-called CoF “card-on-file”); Therefore Payment Aggregators and e-commerce merchants shall replace all current genuine CoF with EMV tokens for better user experience, increase payment authorization rates for online purchases and to prevent fraud.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
