WhatsApp to follow RBI norms on payment data storage: Report

WhatsApp is working to comply with Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines on localisation of payment data, according to a report by The Economic Times. This means that data of WhatsApp Pay users will be stored only on servers in India.

“We plan to comply with RBI guidelines. Only some engineering work is left,” a senior Facebook executive told the newspaper.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

WhatsApp Pay, launched in February last year, is currently in the beta stage and available to only one million users in India.

The central bank had in 2018 mandated that payment data on Indian users should be stored only on servers located in India. In March, RBI informed the Supreme Court that WhatsApp is non-compliant with data localisation norms.

So far, WhatsApp has only sought approval for data mirroring in India, which is the practice of storing data overseas, but creating copies on other servers.

“WhatsApp has realised that there is no way to get away with it,” a senior I-T Ministry official told the newspaper.

WhatsApp’s payment feature, which uses the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), competes with Google Pay, Paytm and PhonePe. In March, 800 million transactions were done via UPI, as per data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).