Google, which is offering payment services in India via Google Pay (formerly Google Tez) have agreed to comply with Reserve Bank of India's norms for payment services by December. Under the RBI norms, every payment service provider in India has to store the data locally, amid security concerns. While Google has stated that it will fully comply with the payment norms of RBI, it confirmed some time would be required to comply with, possibly by December end.
Google Asked to Comply With RBI Rules
"Google during the US visit of Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad conveyed to him that they are ready to comply with RBI rules but want two months more to comply with data storage rule," an official source told reporters at PTI. For the unaware, Ravi Shankar Prasad recently visited Google's headquarters in California, and during that time, he discussed various things about Google in India.
RBI Directed All Payment Service Providers to Comply With Norms
Very recently, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has directed all the companies running payment services to store data in India by mid-October. These companies include Paytm, PhonePe, WhatsApp and so on.
Payment Service Providers to Update RBI Every Fortnight
RBI took this step because of the concerns around data security. Not only to comply with norms, but RBI has also asked all the payment service providers to give an update on action taken by them to store transaction data in the country every fortnight.
The banking regulator had further said that at present "only certain" payment system operators and their outsourcing partners store the payment system data either partly or completely in the country. The order was issued at the time social media major Facebook faced a global backlash over breach of user data.
In other news, WhatsApp has been hit hard by the Indian government asking the Facebook-owned firm to find a solution for stopping spam on the platform. This resulted in WhatsApp's hopes of halting payment services to its over 200 million users in the country.
