RBI Taken Seriously: Mastercard Complies With India’s Latest Data Localisation Norms

Reversing its position, Mastercard has said in a statement that it is locally storing data on Indian financial transactions, as reported by The Economic Times. The deadline for RBI’s data localisation regulations had expired on 15 October and though many companies had complied with the same, Mastercard and Visa were found to breach the rules.

India’s banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), had issued a directive in April, asking payment companies operating in India to store financial data within the physical boundaries of the country. Data localisation was made mandatory to protect India’s data sovereignty. It allows RBI to analyse data on financial transactions emerging out of India and use it for fraud prevention.

RBI had given a six-month deadline and many companies like PhonePe, Google Pay had setup necessary infrastructure for compliance. But Visa and Mastercard were still holding out. These companies were reported to have lobbied hard against the regulation. They proposed a diluted solution called ‘data mirroring’, which would have allowed for Indian financial data to be stored in two data centres, one in India and the other overseas.

Though RBI did not impose any penalties on non-complaint companies in October, it had asked them to submit a schedule to abide by the regulation.