Transaction data of Indian consumers is being deleted from the US-based servers from this month, it is being saved in India now. The exercise by global payments giant Mastercard aims to be completed by this year-end, a top official said. The development comes in the backdrop of the RBI, which has asked such payment technology firms to comply with data localisation norms, which requires them to store transaction data of Indian customers within the boundaries of the country.
Mastercard, however, has already started saving data at servers in India from October last year which is a duplicate data of that saved in the US.
Commenting on the development, Ari Sarker, co-president, Asia Pacific, Mastercard said, "From October 2018, the data has been residing in India, that is step one. The point of challenge is data to be only in India because it is not about putting just a few servers here."
Mastercard has been in discussion with the RBI and there is complete commitment to comply with the requirement of the regulator, Sarker said.
"I am feeling very positive...we are already in an execution mode. It (data de-duplication) is actually getting delivered in three phases because it is fairly complex as it is not about just putting a few servers here in India," he added.
The first phase had begun on May 5, wherein certain components of the transaction of data, such as tokenisation will be available only in India and then there are other steps that Mastercard is complying with such as authorisation of the transactions.
"Token vaults and the likes will be built in India. It will be part of our bigger story where we are able to do this over the course of next few months. By December-end we would have everything to be residing in India from a transaction data point," he said.
Following year going into 2020 and early 2021, Mastercard's current plan is to create a global technology node in India, and then even processing will be happening in India.
"It will actually help us to get a full on-soil domestic transactions processing centre and services hub that we are planning to do in a two year horizon. And the work for these has already started," he added.
Mastercard has committed another USD 1 billion investment for Indian market for five years to 2024. This comes after an investment of similar amount for five years during 2014 to 2019.
Of the planned investment, the US-headquartered company will chip in an excess of USD 300 million to make India a global technology node.
"We are a global network, all transactions traverse through a global network where the technology centres are in the US."
"And now India is going to become the first country outside of the United States which will have a global technology node where all of our processing services, authentication services, tokenisation, all the services that ride around what we call the core transaction is all going to be having an India presence," he said.
Sarker said this will not only give the company an India presence but also give it flexibility how it can use India for any other company's traffic besides helping the company to balance the global network and presence.
"So that is significant, we are also going to continue to expand, our existing capabilities and do more. We are also looking at partnerships, investment opportunities in a more significant way in India. We think india's fintech growth is extremely exciting," he said.
The company has partnered with some fintech companies including RazorPay, Zeta, ToneTag, Fluid AI, Happay, SignZy, ftcash and Syntizen.
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