The story so far: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday banned Mastercard from issuing new debit and credit cards to customers in India with effect from July 22. This meant that foreign card companies had to store complete information about transactions made by Indian customers in servers located within India. But the RBI has remained strict that companies must comply with its data localisation rules. However, many also believe that data localisation rules are too stringent and they could simply be used by governments as tools of economic protectionism. The RBI’s data localisation policy, as it burdens foreign card companies, may end up favouring domestic card issuers like RuPay.

Source: The Hindu July 17, 2021 21:00 UTC