RBI wants you to memorise all your debit, credit card numbers, expiry and CVV | Here’s why

Memorising 16-digits debit cards or credit cards numbers is a difficult task. Especially, for the people who use more than one card. But the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) wants you to memorise it, along with the date of expiry and CVV. All this to prevent online merchants, e-commerce websites, and payment aggregators to store the card details of a customer online or on their servers or databases. 

According to reports, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is going to revise guidelines on the data storage policy. 

The RBI has rejected the proposal made by payment gateway companies with regard to the new regulation that might kick in from January of 2022, as per media reports.

The revised regulations prevent payment aggregators, e-commerce websites and online merchants like Amazon to Flipkart to Google Pay to PayTM to Netflix from storing the information of a customer’s card on their servers or databases. 

The bank acts as an important liaison between the customer and the aggregators. 

This means that rather than just having to enter your CVV to make a payment, customers will have to enter all your card details — name, 16-digit card number and expiry date, CVV — from scratch every time they would want to make an online payment.

This will definitely slow down the convenience of it all, but the aim of this change was to secure the card information and make sure that payment operators are not storing the data on the system. 

India’s central bank argues that the point of not letting third parties store card details is to mitigate the additional risk of fraud and financial theft.

However, earlier in February too, a group of 25 consumer internet companies like Flipkart, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Zomato also wrote to India’s central bank, according to CNBC-TV18. They argued that these rules would severely hamper the customer’s online payment experience. Moreover, it would impact fraud risk assessment. 

Why memorize your Credit/Debit Card credentials?

If the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) revises the guidelines from January 2022 (as is expected) then the customers with debit cards or credit cards will need to punch in their 16-digit card number every time they proceed to make a transaction. 

This will be applicable on all online payment platforms whether you are doing it on a merchant website or e-commerce platform. This might make things more tedious for the customers with more than one card but at last, the point is safety and data security.

Every time you want to renew your Netflix subscription, shop online, or even make an in-app purchase — you’ll have to manually enter all of your card details. You’ll either have to keep your cards on hand or memorise the particulars needed to make a transaction.

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