Saved card no. online? New rules from Oct 1

Vendors Not Allowed To Store Nos., Tokens Will Be Used Instead | Int’l Payments May Be A Pain

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Mumbai: Payment aggregators are finally prepared for the October 1 rollout of RBI’s card-tokenisation norms, which will change the way debit and credit card details are stored by online merchants. The deadline for implementation of tokenisation, which aims to upgrade data security, was extended for the third time in June as the payments industry had asked for more time to avoid disruptions.

From October 1, spends on platforms like e-commerce, food delivery and streaming services will be processed only through tokenisation as against the ‘card on-file’ system, where merchants stored details like card number, CVV and expiry date on their servers. The new system will involve merchants storing unique numbers called tokens that correspond with card details held with banks. A single card will have multiple tokens with different merchants.

For tokenisation, companies have to tie up with payment service providers and set up systems to charge customers’ cards without having to store the information on their servers. Companies like Razorpay, PhonePe, Worldline and Pine Labs provide the bridge for these services between banks and merchants.

A PhonePe spokesperson said that 80% of their monthly active users have tokenised their cards. It has tokenised about 1.4 crore cards so far.