Following RBI guidelines, Visa created 100 million card-on-file tokens

29 Jun 2022 , 03:50 PM

The multinational payments giant Visa said on Tuesday (28-06-2022) that it has produced 100 million tokens for cards-on-file in India.

Visa, alluding to the Reserve Bank of India, said: “This landmark has been achieved in line with RBI’s recommendations on CoF tokenization, concentrating on two major benefits–consumer & ecosystem security and a better checkout experience” (RBI).

The RBI this week extended the tokenization deadline to September 30. After that date, only the card issuers and/or card networks will be allowed to keep the CoF data, and all previously saved copies of this data must be deleted.

According to Sandeep Ghosh, global country manager for India & South Asia at Visa, “Visa has worked hard with our financial partners and merchants in recent months to increase consumer awareness as well as technical enablement for seamless implementation of card tokenization.”

Ghosh said, tokenized transactions have been widely adopted by retailers, growing by 4.5X over the last two months. As the ecosystem transitions to tokenized payments, he continued, “We expect this momentum to continue in the coming months.”

According to the RBI’s CoF tokenization standards, physical card data must be replaced with encrypted digital tokens, which are subsequently used to authorize and enable transactions.