NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday met RBI Deputy Governor BP Kanungo to discuss Reserve Bank of India’s data localisation norm for global financial technology companies, after the Central government had said that all the data must be stored locally in India. The meeting was also attended by Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar and IT Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney. However, they gave no official statement on the deliberations.
According to sources, the meeting had discussed the current status of NBFCs post the ILFS crisis. The RBI is slated to tighten norms for NBFCs and some of them are said to lose their licences. While the Finance Ministry has not commented on it so far, officials said the government is keeping a close watch and will take an appropriate action when required.
In April, the RBI gave six months to global financial technology companies to store transaction data of Indian customers within India. While RBI’s data localisation norms are supposed to come into effect from October 15, the firms have sought an extension of the deadline. A final decision on this would be taken by the RBI.
The RBI, in April, had said that in order to ensure better monitoring of payment service operators, it is important to have “unfettered supervisory access to data stored with these system providers as also with their service providers/intermediaries/third party vendors and other entities in the payment ecosystem”.
“All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India,” it had said. The RBI further said data should include the full end-to-end transaction details, information collected, carried and processed as part of the message and payment instructions.