Worldline partners with major card networks to launch tokenisation solution

Worldline, a global leader in payments solutions, has partnered with major card networks including Visa, Mastercard, and RuPay and leading card issuing banks in building a tokenisation solution to enable businesses to comply with the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) diktat on storage of card details.

The RBI guidelines on card storage will come into effect from January 1, 2022. It would, essentially, mean that merchants, payment aggregators, and acquiring banks can no longer store the card details of customers. Under the new guidelines, only card issuers, and card networks will be able store card details (card on file). Merchants and other entities who have stored card details of customers so far will have to purge the data.  

In a statement on Wednesday, Worldline said that it has developed a fully interoperable plug-and-play solution to enable card on file tokenisation using single integration. Businesses will be able to enable the Worldline tokenisation solution with minimal technical upgrades and continue to offer seamless payment experience to their customers in compliance with the latest guidelines, the company said.

Worldline has partnered with the leading card networks operating in the country. It is also looking to partner with American Express in the near future. It has tied up with some of the leading card issuing banks, thereby supporting the issuance and management of both issuer and network tokens under a single interface.

According to the company, it has developed a full stack solution with token provisioning and authorisation support with very few modification/development efforts in existing integration. The solution comes with both immediate/one-time payments and recurring payments (standing instruction on cards) support.

“RBI’s guidelines on tokenisation will help to boost greater customer confidence in cards as a payment method and encourage the adoption of digital payments. From a long-term perspective, these guidelines will be very beneficial for all the stakeholders involved in the payment ecosystem, as it will not only open possibilities to reach inactive card customer base, but also help in businesses to enhance data security without compromising on customer experience”, said Jagdish Kumar, VP – Products & Solution, Digital Commerce, Worldline India.

Following the RBI’s mandate on storage of card details, many companies have also launched their tokenisation solutions. PayU, an online payment solution provider, has launched “PayU Token Hub”, which offers both network tokens and issuer tokens under a single hub. PayU has been certified by Mastercard and Visa as a token requestor and token provider, which means, PayU will be able to act as token requesters on behalf of merchants.

Similarly, Razorpay has developed “Razorpay TokenHQ”, a multi network card – on – file tokenisation solution. TokenHQ will work across all major card networks including Mastercard, RuPay and Visa, the company had said.

Meanwhile, industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has reached out to the RBI saying it should provide a tiered timeline to merchants for compliance with the new card storage guidelines and also them to store the first few digits of a card (BIN range) to ascertain the network, issuer, card type.