There is going to be good news soon for all credit and debit card holders, as from July 1, 2022 onwards, online merchants will not be able to store customers’ card data.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year had issued debit and credit card tokenisation rules, keeping in mind customer safety. Under the rules, merchants were barred from storing customer card data in their servers.

These card tokenisation rules will now come into effect from July 1, 2022.

RBI had made adoption of card-on-file tokens for domestic online purchases mandatory. The deadline for adoption of card tokens across the country was extended by six months from January 1, 2022 to July 1, 2022.

It will be stored as an encrypted “token” to help customers make secure transactions. These tokens will allow payment to be made without disclosing customer details. RBI guidelines make it mandatory to replace the original card data with an encrypted digital token.

Therefore from July 1, 2022, merchants will have to delete customers’ debit and credit cards’ data from their records.

The card tokenisation system is not mandatory. Therefore if a customer has not given consent for tokenisation of his or her card, then the customer will have to enter all card details like name, card number and card validity instead of entering the card verification value or CVV, every time while making an online payment.

At the same time, if a customer is agreeable towards card tokenisation, then he or she will only have to enter the CVV or one time password (OTP) details  while doing the transaction.

The tokenisation system is totally free of charge and it provides smoother payment experience while security one’s card’s data.

Also tokenisation is only applicable to domestic online transactions.

According to RBI, registration for a tokenisation request is done only with explicit customer consent through Additional Factor of Authentication (AFA), and not by way of a forced or default or automatic selection of check box, radio button, etc.