New Delhi: Global payments giant Mastercard has started to delete transactions data of Indian consumers from US-based servers, and saving the same in India, from this month and expects to complete the de-duplication exercise by this year-end, a top official said.
The moves comes in the backdrop of the regulator RBI asking such payment technology firms to comply with data localisation norms which requires them to store transactions data of Indian customers within the boundaries of India. Mastercard, however, has already started saving data at servers in India from October last year which is duplicate data of that saved in the US.
“From October 2018, the data has been residing in India, that is step one. The point of challenge is data to be only in India because it is not about putting just a few servers here,” Ari Sarker, co-president, Asia Pacific, Mastercard said.
“We are already in an execution mode. It (data de-duplication) is actually getting delivered in three phases because it is fairly complex as it is not about just putting a few servers here in India,” Sarker said. The first phase has started from 5 May, wherein certain components of transaction of data such as tokenisation will be available only in India and then there are other steps that Mastercard is complying with such as authorisation of transaction.
“Token vaults and the likes will be built in India. It will be part of our bigger story where we are able to do this over the course of next few months. By December-end we would have everything to be residing in India from a transaction data point,” he said.
Following year going into 2020 and early 2021, Mastercard’s current plan is to create a global technology node in India, and then even processing will be happening in India. “It will actually help us to get a full on-soil domestic transactions processing centre and services hub that we are planning to do in a two year horizon,” he added.
Mastercard has committed another USD 1 billion investment for Indian market for five years to 2024. This comes after an investment of a similar amount for five years from 2014 to 2019. Of the planned investment, the US-headquartered company will chip in an excess of USD 300 million to make India a global technology node.