Digital payments platform PhonePe on Thursday announced that it has tokenised cards on all three major payment networks - Visa, Mastercard and Rupay.
"PhonePe’s tokenisation solution will help businesses save time and effort by removing the need to integrate with multiple card networks while complying with RBI guidelines," it said in an official release.
The Reserve Bank of India has asked payment aggregators and the merchants onboarded by them to not store actual credit card data. Starting January 1, 2022, no entity in the card transaction or payment chain, other than the card issuers and/or card networks, shall store the actual card data. Instead, cardholders can get digital tokens to complete their online transactions.
A token is a string of randomly generated numbers. Tokenisation provides users an added layer of security by converting sensitive cardholder data to tokens.
PhonePe is offering its tokenisation solution “PhonePe Safecard'' to enable businesses to offer tokenisation on their own platforms via an API integration.
"With this solution, businesses can create, process, delete and modify tokens for online card payments with customers’ consent," it explained.
PhonePe also takes care of any additional authentication for users, if needed. Merchants will also get a dedicated and secured vault in a PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard) compliant environment.
Customers can save their cards issued by all three major networks (Visa, Mastercard and Rupay). They will not have to enter their 16-digit card number for every transaction on the PhonePe app and across lakhs of PhonePe (online and physical) merchants, it said.
Deep Agrawal, Head of Payments, PhonePe said, “We are delighted to be the first payments platform to offer card tokenisation across all 3 major card networks in the country - Visa, Mastercard and Rupay."
"This is a significant milestone for us and will benefit millions of our merchant partners by helping them comply with the RBI guidelines and ensuring a seamless customer experience. PhonePe’s over 33 crore registered consumers will also have a unique benefit as they can now tokenise their credit and/or debit cards just once and enjoy seamless usage across all our merchant partners. We continue to work closely with our large base of merchants to help them elevate their customer experience by adopting PhonePe SafeCard," said Agrawal.