Global card payments brand Mastercard has started storing new Indian transaction data locally, in adherence to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines, said the company.
In April this year, RBI asked companies such as Mastercard, Visa and American Express to store their payments data “only in India” so that the regulator could have “unfettered supervisory access”, starting from October.
The new directive sparked a lot of aggression the United States-based companies who said that it would inflate their infrastructure costs.
The companies even requested RBI to allow them to store data both locally and at their offshore offices, a practice widely known as “data mirroring”. But the central bank denied their request.
Followed by this, Mastercard has started storing all its new payments transaction data in India at its technology centre based in Pune. The company, however, did not specify whether a copy of that data was still being stored abroad.
The company added that it has submitted a proposal with RBI for “storage of data only in India within a specified timeframe”. However, it did not share any timeline.
Visa too has begun saving a copy of the new Indian transaction data locally and has requested some time from RBI to comply with the storage standard of Indian data within the country, reported sources.
Visa too has started storing a copy of its new transaction data locally and had sought time from the RBI to comply with the requirement to store Indian data only within the country, two industry sources said.
