RBI to extend card tokenization deadline by 6 months

In order to enhance the security for customers, The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had issued guidelines prohibiting payment merchants and aggregators from storing sensitive data such as card details of their customers on their database or server from 30 June 2021. Due to the industry’s lack of preparedness, RBI has further pushed the compliance date to July 2022.

Usually, for the ease of access and speedy transaction, many merchants suggest that users save their card details in the application, some payment portals even force them to store their card details. Many merchants have an extensive record of such sensitive data, which is highly susceptible to cyber-attacks. Numerous data breaches have taken place in the recent past where customer data has been compromised. RBI has directed the payment aggregators to adopt the method of tokenisation and implement other techniques to secure their customers’ data.