About $350 million of the $1 billion that Mastercard plans to invest in India over the next five years will be used to set up a local payments processing centre to comply with the RBI's data localisation directive, the Economic Times reported. The processing centre is expected to open in the next 18 months, most likely in Pune, and will be Mastercard’s first outside the US. It is expected to handle tasks such as circuit switching for ATMs; and prepaid, point-of-sale, and ecommerce transactions; and offer associated services such as fraud mitigation, tokenisation and authentication, the report said. Last April the RBI said that all payments system operators working in India must ensure that data related to payment systems operated by them is stored in the country, and gave companies until October 15, 2018 to comply. Mastercard had previously invested $1 billion in India over the past five years, through which it made several acquisitions, increased employment, and improved its technology development capabilities, per The Hindu. According to the RBI, there were 990.6 million cards (46 million credit cards and 945 million debit cards) in India at the end of February. Mastercard’s concerns about data localisation In July, Mastercard called for the RBI to relax its data localisation rules, saying it hoped that payment companies would be allowed to transfer or store user data outside India to help prevent fraud. But in December, the company submitted the timeline for complying with the RBI’s rules. It told the central bank that…
