While Visa had partially complied with the RBI mandate in 2018, it has now become the first global financial services company to begin storing user data only in India. Payment card network Visa has complied with the Reserve Bank of India's 2018 circular on localising payments data, The Hindu Business Line reported. While the company has not made any public announcements on its compliance with that circular, which requires payments industry players to store all user data in India, and only in India, circumstances point to Visa being unlikely to have run afoul of the requirements. Earlier this month, RBI froze banks from issuing new Mastercard payment cards, but has not signalled that it is likely to do the same for Visa. Why this matters: While Mastercard and Visa are a practical duopoly in many parts of the world, the payment localisation requirements seem to have thrown them off. Mastercard grumbled in 2018 that no other country in the world has such stringent data localisation norms that disallow mirroring, the practice of localising user data while also storing it in servers around the world. As long as Mastercard remains non-compliant, the Indian card payment network market is still a duopoly; but this time, the other player is RuPay, the National Payments Corporation of India's homegrown alternative. All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India. This data should include the full end-to-end transaction details / information collected…
