Visa creates 100 mn card-on-file tokens following RBI norms last week

The landmark has been achieved in line with RBI's guidelines focusing on security and enhanced checkout experience, said Visa

Visa, the global payments company, said on Tuesday it has created 100 million card-on-file tokens in India.

“This landmark has been achieved in line with RBI’s guidelines on CoF tokenisation, focusing on two key benefits--consumer & ecosystem security and an enhanced checkout experience,” said Visa, referring to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

The RBI last week extended the deadline for tokenisation to September 30 after which no entity in the card transaction / payment chain, other than the card issuers and/ or card networks, can store the CoF data, and any such data stored previously has to be purged.

“In recent months, Visa has worked closely with our banking partners and merchants to drive consumer awareness as well as technology enablement for seamless adoption of card tokenization,” said Sandeep Ghosh, group country manager India & South Asia, Visa.

Ghosh said tokenised transactions have seen significant adoption across merchants, clocking 4.5X growth over the past two months.

“We expect this momentum to continue in the coming months as the ecosystem migrates to tokenised payments,” he added.

RBI’s CoF tokenisation guidelines mandate replacing actual card data with encrypted digital tokens, which are then used to facilitate and authenticate transactions.