PhonePe becomes first to tokenise cards on Visa, Mastercard and Rupay

PhonePe on December 16 announced that it has become the first payments platform to tokenise cards on all three major payment networks - Visa, Mastercard and Rupay.

PhonePe's tokenisation solution 'PhonePe Safecard' will help businesses save significant time and effort by removing the need to integrate with multiple card networks while complying with RBI guidelines.

The payments and financial services startup had on November 2 launched the tokenisation solution for online debit and credit card transactions.

As per RBI’s guidelines that are aimed at making card payments more secure, PAs and merchants shall not store card credentials of customers in their database starting January 1, 2022.

Also Read: RBI on digital payments: A win for UPI, a setback for Paytm and other wallet players?

This solution enables businesses to offer tokenisation on their own platforms via simple API integration and a minimum turnaround time. With this solution, businesses can create, process, delete and modify tokens for online card payments with customers’ consent, the company said in a statement.

With this solution, customers can securely save their cards issued by all three major networks minimising any chance of transactional fraud, it said.

They will also 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.

Commenting on the development, 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."

He further added: "PhonePe’s 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.”

Earlier, on December 13 the company said it has processed over 100 crore person-to-merchant (P2M) Unified Payment Interface transactions on its platform in November.