Most of the large merchants have complied with the RBI's card-on-file CoF tokenisation norms and 19.5 crore token has been issued, sources said.
The RBI had ordered the merchants to implement its tokenisation norms by June 30, 2022. The deadline for its implementation has been extended in the past by the central bank.
Card-on- file or CoF refers to card information stored by payment gateway and merchants to process future transactions.
The system is well prepared, as most large merchants have already adjusted, according to the sources.
Some of them are in the process of making these changes, while some foreign entities business may not be that large for them to focus on making these changes, according to the sources.
There are about 19.5 crore tokens that have been issued so far, and it is going up regularly, they said.
Under tokenisation services, a unique alternate code is generated to facilitate transactions through cards.
In September, the RBI imposed a ban on merchants from storing customer card details on their servers with effect January 1, 2022, and mandated the adoption of CoF tokenisation as an alternative to card storage.
With tokenisation, the storage of card details is limited.
In March 2020, the RBI stipulated that authorised payment aggregation and merchants should not store actual card data to minimise vulnerable points in the system. It extended the deadline to December 2021 as a one-time measure on a request from the industry.