New Delhi: Online shopping is not going to be easy after January 2022 when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rolls out its revised set of guidelines on data storage policy. Once the new rule comes into effect, credit and debit cardholders may have to enter their 16-digit card number every time they shop online as opposed to entering the card verification value (CVV) and the one-time password (OTP).
The RBI refused to accept the proposal made by the payment gateway companies as per the new regulations. The central bank has refused to change its decision to disallow e-commerce giants and merchants such as Amazon, Netflix and Flipkart from storing customer card details in their databases.
Here is what cardholders will have to do
After the new changes are introduced, customers who own a debit or credit card will have to enter their 16-digit card details — name, card number, expiry date and CVV every time they do a transaction.
The apex bank was supposed to bring in the new guidelines in July but then it had to postpone it by six months as a few other banks were not ready to implement them.
The RBI wants customers to memorise their card details for various online transactions to prevent online merchants and payment aggregators from storing card details online on their servers. The aim is to secure the card information, but eventually, it will become difficult for these websites to focus on their target audience.
The payment aggregators might implement tokenisation (converting a meaningful piece of data, such as an account number, into a random string of characters known as tokens) as one of the methods, but details need to be hidden with codes for that card. The term tokenisation means converting a meaningful piece of data, such as an account number, into a random string of characters known as tokens.
Once the new guidelines are implemented, it may be tough even for the authorised card operators to access data for smooth processing of grievances and in resolving issues.
