NEW DELHI: Reserve Bank of India on Thursday has extended the deadline for card tokenisation by six months till June 30, 2022 on the request of industry.
“In light of various representations received in this regard, we advise as under: a) the timeline for storing of CoF data is extended by six months, i.e., till June 30, 2022; post this, such data shall be purged; and b) in addition to tokenisation, industry stakeholders may devise alternate mechanism(s) to handle any use case (including recurring e-mandates, EMI option, etc.) or posttransaction activity (including chargeback handling, dispute resolution, reward/loyalty programme, etc.) that currently involves / requires storage of CoF data by entities other than card issuers and card networks,” the central bank said in a circular.
Tokenisation refers to the replacement of credit and debit card details with an alternate code called ‘token’. A token is unique for each card.
In order to make digital payment more secure, the RBI has formed a new rule which said that all merchants and payment gateways have to use encrypted tokens to carry out transactions. RBI has asked all merchants and payment gateways to delete sensitive customer data available at their end.
This was scheduled to come into effect on January 1, 2022.