In a move that would cheer most foreign payment firms operating in India, the country’s finance ministry has proposed to ease the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) guidelines on storage of payment system data, a report by Reuters said. The Central bank, in April, has mandated all payments system operators working in India to ensure that data related to payment systems operated by them is stored in the country. “In order to have unfettered access to all payment data for supervisory purposes, it has been decided that all payment system operators will ensure that data related to payment systems operated by them are stored only inside the country within a period of six months,” the RBI said in a report during its Monetary Policy meeting in April. The move would have come into effect from October 15 this year, according to a report by the Economic Times. However, the intense lobbying carried out by most of these major payment firms, especially the American ones, seems to have paid off. According to the report by Reuters, India’s finance ministry, in a meeting held in June with RBI officials and executives from payment firms, said that a possible solution could be that companies would be allowed to store data offshore, as long as a copy was kept in India. At the meeting, finance ministry officials asked the central bank to clarify about the kind of data that needed to be stored and the time given to implement the directive, according to a copy of the minutes…
