The Reserve Bank of India on Thursday asked all payment system operators to ensure that data is stored within the country.
The bank gave the operators, including Visa, MasterCard, Google and Paytm, six months’ time to comply with the order. Asian countries such as China, Japan and Malaysia follow the same data storage rule.
However, the directive only requires data from Indian consumers to be stored locally. It does not mention that a copy of it cannot be stored abroad, according to Medianama. The RBI will issue detailed instructions by next week.
“In order to have unfettered access to all payment data for supervisory purposes, it has been decided that all payment system operators will ensure that data related to payment systems operated by them are stored only inside the country within a period of six months,” the RBI said in a report.
In the last few years, digital payment has been on the rise in India. There were 171.4 million Unified Payments Interface transactions in February alone. Of these, Paytm accounted for 40% of the transactions while the rest were done on apps such as BHIM and PhonePe.
According to RBI data, the value of credit and debit card transaction has gone up to Rs 3.5 lakh crore a month from Rs 2.5 lakh crore in November 2016, when Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were demonetised.
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