The Facebook-owned messaging platform, WhatsApp has built a system to store payment-related data locally in India. The move is aimed at complying with Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) data localisation norms.
The new move of WhatsApp is expected to threaten established industry giants, SoftBank and Alibaba supported Paytm.
Media reports earlier stated that the formal launch of WhatsApp’s inter-bank money transfer service was also postponed following lack of clarity on the local data storage norms in the country.
The payment gateways including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Google, and others met finance minister Arun Jaitley recently to obtain an extension of the last date (October 15) to set up a system for local storage of payments data, according to the media reports.
“All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India. This data should include the full end-to-end transaction details/information collected/ carried/processed as part of the message/payment instruction. For the foreign leg of the transaction, if any, the data can also be stored in the foreign country, if required,” said a directive from RBI released April 6, this year.
“System providers shall ensure compliance of above within a period of six months and report compliance of the same to the Reserve Bank latest by October 15, 2018,” the RBI said fixing a deadline to set up the new system to store the data locally.
