The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has, with good reason, been lauded for its contributions to India’s fintech revolution. The RBI’s progressive approach towards regulation and its attitude towards new technologies and business models have been instrumental in shaping the country’s fintech industry and in creating a more scalable, secure, and stable financial services landscape.
Yet, despite these achievements, some of the RBI’s more recent policy decisions have baffled fintech stakeholders and have been described, candidly of course, as regressive, and short-sighted. Key among these questionable policies are the restrictions sought to be imposed by the regulator on the storage of card credentials by merchants and payment aggregators.
These restrictions, which were supposed to come into effect on July 1, 2021, have been deferred to December 31, 2021, and will introduce a new source of friction for card-based e-commerce payments which stakeholders fear could force consumers back to cash payments and undermine the tremendous progress achieved in card adoption over the last decade.
Please click here to read the full article by Probir Roy Chowdhury and Yajas Setlur published in IFLR Asia Fintech Focus 2021.
Probir specializes in Corporate Commercial, Venture/Private Equity and Information Technology/FinTech. He has been involved in corporate transactions focused on the high technology industry including cross border Mergers & Acquisitions.