NEW DELHI: Foreign payment firms could keep copies of customer data in India while retaining offshore storage operations, the government said, as a way to resolve a row with Mastercard, Visa and American Express over the localisation of such information.
A decision by the RBI in April that all payments data should, within six months, be stored only in the country for “unfettered supervisory access” has led to furious lobbying by global firms that worry it would cost them millions of dollars. Economic affairs secretary S C Garg said that keeping data copies in the country had emerged as a possible solution during a meeting with officials from the RBI and executives from the payment firms.
“One of the options which emerged in that meeting was maybe mirror copies might be a potential solution,” Garg said on Saturday. He said the central bank had to take a final decision on the matter but keeping mirror images of the data in India would mean all the customer information would be available to local authorities.
The RBI’s directive comes as more people in the country are switching to plastic, partly driven by Prime Minister Narendra Modi government’s decision to replace high-value currency notes in November 2016.