Yes Bank on September 21 announced its partnership with Visa to offer credit cards to its customers. "The transition has been achieved within a record time of less than 60 days, ensuring ease for customers across segments," the bank said referring to the shift from Mastercard. All the banks' offerings— consumer cards, business cards, and corporate cards— will now be powered by Visa. RBI's Mastercard ban The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in July barred Mastercard from onboarding new domestic customers in India onto its card network because of non-compliance with data localisation guidelines. Based on Yes Bank’s website and information from Samsung Pay, it appears that Yes Bank previously issued cards only on the Mastercard network. As such, they were likely impacted adversely by the RBI’s supervisory action. At the end of May, Yes Bank had 967,351 credit cards, all Mastercard ones, in circulation. RBL Bank too had been issuing only on the Mastercard network and had to shift to Visa. Earlier this year, the RBI had barred American Express and Diners Club from onboarding new customers due to non-compliance with its data localisation guidelines. A few days after the ban, Mastercard said that it has complied with the local data storage norms laid down by the RBI and has filed a new audit report on July 20 to notify the central bank of its compliance. The RBI’s data localisation guidelines In 2018, the RBI had issued the following directions after it observed that not all payments companies were storing data in India: Entire data relating…
