Data Localisation: Jaitley Meets RBI DG, IT Secy

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, on Monday met RBI Deputy Governor B P Kanungo to discuss RBI’s data localisation norm for global financial technology companies.

The Reserve Bank in April gave six months time to global payment companies to store transaction data of Indian customers within India. The RBI’s data localisation norms will come into effect from October 15.

The meeting was also attended by Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar and IT Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney.

Officials, however, refused to comment on the deliberations in the meeting.

Global financial technology companies have reportedly sought an extension of the October 15 deadline. A final decision on this would be taken by the RBI.

The RBI in April said in order to ensure better monitoring of payment service operators it is important to have unfettered supervisory access to data stored with these system providers as also with their service providers/ intermediaries/third party vendors and other entities in the payment ecosystem .

All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India, it had said.

The RBI further said data should include the full end-to-end transaction details, information collected/carried/ processed as part of the message/payment instruction. – The Hindu Business Line