RBI extends deadline for full wallet KYC

In a move that could give some respite to the digital payments industry the Reserve Bank of India has extended the deadline for completion of full KYC of mobile wallet users by six months.

In a late evening notification issued on Monday, the RBI said that based on industry inputs, the regulator has decided to initiate this step. The deadline was supposed to be February 28 previously.

“Based on requests received from various stakeholders to increase the above timeline on account of difficulties in undertaking Aadhaar e-KYC and time necessary to put in place alternative systems for completing the KYC process, it has been decided to allow PPI issuers additional time of six months for completion of the KYC process,” said the RBI.

The payments industry was in a state of disarray following complete silence from the regulator over the last couple of months regarding a request for an extension given that Aadhaar based eKYC had stopped post the Supreme Court judgement on privacy concerns around Aadhaar.

Industry sources had pointed out that barring Paytm which had undertaken a massive KYC drive to shore up accounts for its payments bank business, other mobile wallet companies were lagging behind in their attempt to capture full personal details of their users.

“The industry average would be less than 10% of full KYC wallets,” said a senior payments industry executive.

In the meantime ET had also learnt that Payments Council of India, the industry body for payment companies had started collecting data from its member entities to impress upon the regulator the need for an extension. Now with the six months deadline extension the companies could heave a sigh of relief.