RBI New rules: You need to keep your debit, credit card handy to make online payments

New Delhi: A debit or credit card number is 16 digits, and not everyone has the bandwidth to memorise them in their entirety. Especially, since most people use more than one card.

But, according to the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) new rules, you may not have a choice. The only other alternative is to take your cards wherever you go. India’s apex banking institution has issued new guidelines dictating that online merchants, e-commerce websites and payment aggregators this includes everyone from Amazon to Flipkart to Google Pay to PayTM to Netflix will no longer be allowed to store card details of a customer online.

According to the RBI’s circular, these new guidelines will come into effect starting July 2021. This means that rather than just having to enter your CVV to make a payment, you’ll have to enter all your card details name, card number and expiry date from scratch every time you want to make an online payment.

One would think that in the push for ‘Digital India’, these new rules would hamper the process of creating a cashless country. But, India’s central bank argues that the point of not letting third parties store card details is to mitigate the additional risk of fraud and financial theft.