PhonePe's 'SafeCard' tokenisation solution to help users meet RBI norms

The enterprise will also be creating simplified APIs for its online merchants to enable tokenisation with minimal effort

Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe has launched PhonePe SafeCard, a tokenisation solution for online debit and credit card transactions. This solution will enable both PhonePe users and merchant partners to continue experiencing the convenience of saved card transactions with increased security, and in compliance with the new Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines. This solution supports all major card networks such as Mastercard, Rupay and Visa.

Tokenisation provides users an added layer of security by converting sensitive cardholder data to a string of randomly generated numbers known as a token. All a customer has to do is to provide a one time consent via OTP (one-time password) and undertake a transaction to tokenize their debit and/or credit card for the first time. This feature will enable users to utilise saved card details for seamless transactions across the PhonePe ecosystem.

“RBI’s new guideline mandating tokenization is timely and progressive for the Indian digital payments ecosystem. This will allow for the continued growth of digital payments, with the additional security that tokenization provides,” said Ankit Gaur, Director of Online Business at PhonePe. “Crucially, PhonePe SafeCard ensures that the added security doesn’t impact the customer experience at all. We are also closely working with our large merchant base to take them live on this platform.”

SafeCard will also enable PhonePe merchant partners to offer and use tokenisation on their own platforms via a simple Application programming interface (API) integration. With this solution, merchant partners can create, process, delete and modify tokens for online card payments with customers’ consent. This will save the merchant partners significant time and effort by removing the need to integrate with multiple card networks, while also ensuring full compliance with the RBI guidelines.

PayU, a leading online payments solutions provider, announced the launch of its unique tokenisation solution ‘PayU Token Hub’, which will enable businesses to comply with Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI's) latest guidelines on online card data storage, while allowing issuing banks to also generate their own tokens. To help millions of Indian businesses comply with the new RBI guidelines, fintech unicorn Razorpay had also announced the launch of ‘Razorpay TokenHQ’ a multi-network Card-on-File (CoF) Tokenisation solution.