India: Finance Ministry suggests middle ground on RBI’s order to store payment’s data on Indian soil

July 16, 2018

Source: www.rbi.org.in

On April 06, 2018, the Reserve Bank of India had notified that the data relating to payments such as transactions, end-to-end details / information collected / carried / processed as part of the message / payment instruction (cashless) has to be stored within the Country. This came as heavy winds to many multinational payment gateways such as Visa, MasterCard etc. which store their data on servers located in various IT havens such as Singapore, etc. With an intent of have
unfettered access to the data reserves of the payment system providers, the order by RBI, stated that payment system operators are required to ensure that all data related to payment systems operated by them is stored
only within India. The deadline for this humongous task was to be six months from April.

As per the RBI Circular, all payment system providers were
inter alia required to report their compliance to the circular before the said deadline. It further required that an audit be conducted by CERT-IN empaneled auditors certifying completion of the activity. The last date for submitting the audit report is not later than 31 December 2018.

Amidst this major compliance to be undertaken by the various payment providers, banking services providers, etc. the Finance ministry has intervened suggesting that the digitalized payment industry be should allowed to retain a copy of the data outside India wherever it is being currently stored and should be allowed for mirroring the same on Indian servers. We look forward to the how the Indian economy and the banking regulator reacts to this suggestion. Visit this space for more updates in the matter.

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