MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India on Thursday extended card tokenization deadline by six months till June 30, 2022, from the earlier deadline of December 31, 2021.
"The timeline for storing of CoF (card-on-file) data is extended by six months, i.e., till June 30, 2022; post this, such data shall be purged," it said in a notification.
"In addition to tokenization, industry stakeholders may devise alternate mechanism(s) to handle any use case or post-transaction activity that currently involves or requires storage of CoF data by entities other than card issuers and card networks."
The RBI's card tokenization guidelines mandated replacing the actual card data with encrypted digital tokens, which are then used to facilitate and authenticate transactions.
The devaluation of sensitive card details would have alleviated risk and reduced vulnerability of sensitive data. However, industry bodies urged the RBI to extend card tokenization deadline beyond December 31, 2021. The Merchant Payments Alliance of India (MPAI) and the Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) had recently urged the central bank to extend the CoF tokenization deadline of December 31 for merchants.
Citing several operational challenges that will hinder the transition to the token-based payments ecosystem, the industry bodies voiced their concerns over industry readiness on the RBI directive on card-on-file tokenization.
The MPAI and ADIF said that 'ecosystem readiness' is a sequential process of going live with stable API (application programming interface) documentation for tokenized transactions. (IANS)
Also Read: RBI Imposes Monetary Penalty of Rs 1.80 crore On Punjab National Bank And Rs 30 lakh on ICICI Bank
Also Watch: