MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has extended the deadline for card tokenization by six months, to June 30, 2022, from December 31, 2021. "The deadline for storing CoF (card-on-file) data has been extended by six months, to June 30, 2022; after that, such data will be purged," the agency stated in a statement.

"In addition to tokenization, industry stakeholders may create alternative mechanism(s) to handle any use case or post-transaction activity that currently involves or needs CoF data storage by entities other than card issuers and card networks." The RBI's card tokenisation rules required that actual card data be replaced with encrypted digital tokens, which would subsequently be used to facilitate and validate transactions.

The devaluation of sensitive card information would have decreased risk and made sensitive data less vulnerable. Industry groups, on the other hand, have urged the RBI to extend the deadline for card tokenization beyond December 31, 2021.

The Merchant Payments Alliance of India (MPAI) and the Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) recently petitioned the Reserve Bank of India to extend the December 31 deadline for merchants to tokenize their CoFs.

The industry associations expressed their concerns about the industry's preparation for the RBI mandate on card-on-file tokenisation, citing many operational problems that will stymie the shift to the token-based payments environment.

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