Mastercard enables more than 2 lakh online merchants for Card-on-File Tokenization

By Leandra Monteiro

In support of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) directive mandating card-on-file (COF) tokenization for merchants, Mastercard announced that it has enabled over two lakh online merchants of all sizes across the country with card-on-file tokenization.

In line with Mastercard’s commitment to partnering with the government to enable a safe, secure digital payments ecosystem, the company has worked with over 45,000 merchants, 34 issuing banks, 10 acquiring banks and 30 plus token requestors (including all major payment aggregators), as well as services providers to create 90 million tokens for Mastercard cardholders since December 2021.

Card-on-file tokenization, as mandated by the RBI, replaces sensitive payment credentials of cardholder such as card number and expiry date with an alternate number which is called token. It inhibits entities in the transaction value chain from collecting and saving cardholders’ details, providing an additional layer of security that enhances consumer confidence and trust. Tokenization gives cardholders peace of mind that they can make secure, digital payments without having to worry about online payment fraud.

“Mastercard is pleased to help facilitate the timely rollout of card-on-file tokenization in India. Security, reliability, and convenience are the core tenets of a robust digital payment ecosystem. Tokenization brings these tenets to life by ensuring the security of cardholder data without compromising the convenience and ease of online shopping. It also helps merchants to enable a ‘one-click’ checkout experience, ensuring fast, seamless transactions for cardholders. Mastercard is supportive of the RBI’s mandate which will empower the larger merchant community and millions of cardholders to make rapid strides towards a less cash economy,” said Nikhil Sahni, Country Corporate Officer, India & Division President, South Asia, Mastercard.

Additionally, Mastercard’s collaboration with payment aggregators such as Juspay, PayU, Razorpay, BillDesk and Paytm, have already enabled countless merchants to process token-based transactions. The number of merchants adopting tokenization is expected to increase further in the run up to the RBI’s September 30 deadline.

Mastercard has been encouraging all merchants and payment aggregators to ramp-up transaction processing using tokens by August 1, 2022 for millions of cardholder who already tokenized their cards.

Commenting on this, Sheetal Lalwani, Co-founder & COO of Juspay said, “Juspay’s vision is to make payments secure and frictionless. We are one of the early believers in tokenization and have invested heavily to build an enterprise-grade, full-stack tokenization infrastructure to support high performance, scale and security. In line with RBI’s mandate for COF tokenization, Juspay has become a leading player to support merchants for both set-up and processing of transactions on tokens. Our partnership with Mastercard is critical in taking tokenization to the masses. In the coming months, we will continue to work with our partners to increase its scale and adoption.”

Mohit Gopal, Chief Operating Office, PayU payments said, “PayU is pleased to work with Mastercard to help businesses embrace the card-on-file (COF) tokenization norms seamlessly. Like Mastercard, PayU is also committed to providing an innovative & robust solution for easy compliance with RBI guidelines through its fully interoperable solution PayU Token Hub. Through our solutions and our partnership with payment networks like Mastercard, we hope to facilitate a smooth transition to tokenization for all popular payments use cases”.