RBI’s card storage rules, which prohibit merchants and payment gateways/aggregators from storing the card details of customers, were set to go into effect at the start of July, but the regulator last week extended the deadline by three months because the payments ecosystem wasn't ready. But the extension, on its own, does not really address the concerns and requests raised by the various stakeholders, people monitoring the development closely explained to MediaNama. Why does this matter? RBI's deadline has already shifted twice from December 31, 2021, to June 30, 2022, to September 31, 2022. These shifting deadlines make it look like RBI is giving sufficient time to merchants, but the concerns of the merchants lie elsewhere and without RBI addressing those, merchants will likely be in the same boat as they are now at the end of September. What are the unaddressed concerns? 1. Acquirer banks still not allowed to store card data Since merchants and payment aggregators will not be allowed to store card details, one of the alternatives for online card transactions is guest checkout, where the customer enters the card details every time. The way systems are built today, if a person wants to pay for something on Amazon, for that payment to go through and for Amazon to receive that money, three parties need access to the card number. One is the card network, the second is the bank that issued the customer's card, and the third is Amazon's bank, which is the acquiring bank. But the problem here is that RBI’s rules…
