The deadline for merchants in India to eliminate card data and replace it with tokens is now June 30th this year. 100% compliance is unlikely given banks responsible for 9% of online card transactions can’t yet support tokenization and the regulation issued December 23rd 2021 offers significant loopholes:
“In India, Mastercard has significant progress in enabling the ecosystem players including roll out the services to card holders. All major Issuer banks contributing to 91% of online payments spend are enabled for CoF tokenization.
Merchants have the option to either integrate directly with Mastercard or engage with on-behalf token requesters to roll-out tokenization services to end users. Over 15 payment aggregators and service providers are certified as token requestors and are onboarding the boarder merchant ecosystem
All major Payment Aggregators, Payment Gateways and Acquirers are enabled to process transactions using tokens. Ultimately roll-out of Mastercard MDES services enables a safer payment ecosystem, inspiring trust from consumers and increasing transaction volume across the digital channels to return greater revenue to merchants.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
