Following the demonstration of "satisfactory compliance" with the data localisation norms, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on November 9 lifted the restrictions imposed on Diners Club in April, allowing the company to restart onboarding new credit card customers in India. Although Diners has a paltry market share in India's credit card space, its compliance with the regulations currently makes it the only other international card issuer in India along with Visa because both, American Express and Mastercard, continue to be under the RBI's restrictions. MediaNama has reached out to Diners Club and HDFC Bank, which is the sole issuer of Diners Club cards in India, asking details on when they will start reissuing cards and the proposed plan to make up foregone market share. We will update this report once we receive a response. American Express and Mastercard are still under restrictions Along with Diners Club, RBI had also imposed restrictions on American Express in April this year. Then in July, RBI imposed the same restrictions on Mastercard. At the time, an American Express spokesperson told MediaNama that the company is in regular dialogue with RBI about the data localisation requirements and has demonstrated its progress towards complying with the regulation. Meanwhile, Mastercard in August said that it has complied with the local data storage norms laid down by the RBI and has filed a new audit report: “When RBI required us to provide additional clarifications about our data localization framework in April, 2021, we retained government-empaneled Deloitte to perform a supplemental audit…
