Data monetisation should have consumer consent: RBI deputy governor

Last month, the government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill from the Lok Sabha and IT Minister had said the Centre was hopeful of getting a new legislation passed by the next Budget Session

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar on Monday said customer data should be monetised in a responsible manner with some level of customer consent.

“At a recent conference, many corporates discussed with me how they can access UPI (Unified Payments Interface) data because that will give information which could be used to structure products that can be specifically targeted at specific cohorts of the population. We will have to primarily have laws in place followed by regulations which ensure that customer data is not only safe and privacy is not only protected, but the monetisation of customer data is done in a responsible manner with some level of customer consent,” he said at an event organised by NCAER.

“Something like the data protection bill needs to be in place for large-scale usage of data.”

Last month, the government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill from the Lok Sabha and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had said the Centre was hopeful of getting a new legislation passed by the next Budget Session of Parliament.

The deputy governor said though there is no gender gap in terms of account ownership, there is about 17 per cent gap in terms of using those accounts for digital payments. “We need to use this data to bridge the gender gap. We depend immensely on the private sector in developing innovative products and in generating businesses that would enable us to achieve our policy objective while the private sector achieves its own objective of profit maximisation,” he added.

National Payments Corporation of India MD and CEO Dilip Asbe said customer experience is very important and the payment experience on a feature phone has to be better. “Unless that is done, making the customer move from assistant mode to self-sufficiency mode is very difficult,” he added.