What's the news: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on June 24 extended the deadline for its new card storage rules from the end of this month to September 30. Why does this matter? RBI's new rules prevent merchants (like Amazon and Zomato) and payment aggregators (like PayU and Juspay) from storing the debit and credit card details of customers. The alternative for online card transactions is either guest checkout, where customers enter card details every time, or card tokenisation, where merchants store unique tokens of cards rather than actual card details and process transactions based on the tokens. But both these alternatives are not ready for various reasons (covered in-depth here), meaning that online card transactions would've started failing from July 1 if the RBI rules went into effect. Read — Deep Dive: Why Online Debit And Credit Card Transactions Will Start Failing From July 1 Why is RBI extending the deadline? "The industry stakeholders have highlighted some issues related to the implementation of the framework in respect of guest checkout transactions. Also, the number of transactions processed using tokens is yet to gain traction across all categories of merchants. These issues are being dealt with in consultation with the stakeholders, and to avoid disruption and inconvenience to cardholders, the Reserve Bank has today announced extension of the said timeline of June 30, 2022 by three more months, i.e., to September 30, 2022." — RBI Shifting deadlines: RBI's card storage rules were announced in March 2020 and the initial deadline was December…
