Thales brings its ‘Trusted Merchant Gateway’ to India

By Leandra Monteiro

Thales has announced that it is bringing its TSH Merchant Gateway (TMG) tokenization platform to further contribute towards securing the digital payment ecosystem of India. With the aim of further helping the card issuers to protect sensitive data by substituting it with non-sensitive data, the tokenisation solution by Thales ensures enhanced security for all stakeholders in India.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recently issued a circular for the device-based tokenisation framework extending to Card-on-File Tokenisation (CoFT) services and making EMV tokenization mandatory from 1 January 2022. This implies that no entity in the card transaction and payment chain (other than the card issuers and/or card networks) shall store the actual card data. With this, card issuers have been permitted to offer card tokenisation services as Token Service Providers (TSPs).

The merchants, aggregators and payment gateways can benefit from the expertise of technical leaders like Thales to become compliant with this RBI mandate and offer more secure payment services to their customers in India. And hence, Thales has introduced its TSH Merchant Gateway (TMG) service, which is built over its proven and robust TSH platform. The TSH platform has been enabling digital payment use cases since 2017 with millions of tokens issued till date and is serving more than 100 customers spread over 50 countries. The TMG service is highly scalable with 100% uptime since its launch in Q1 2020. Thales is a certified token requestor by network schemes including Visa & Mastercard and its TSH platform is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certified.

Commenting on the announcement, Ashish Saraf, VP and Country Director – India, Thales stated, “We are extremely delighted to announce our diverse and versatile solutions for tokenization in India. This comes at a time when the Reserve Bank of India has recently notified its tokenization policy. This move will set in motion positive developments in the eCommerce sector across India and help in building a safer and seamless environment for digital payments. Thales’ TMG platform offers a range of benefits such as improved security, enhanced user experience, elimination of false transaction declines, reduction in card skimming fraud and automatic card credentials update amongst others. We look forward to working with different stakeholders in the country and help them meet the deadline of 31 December 2021 set by RBI.”

In India, Thales provides banking payment cards and digital banking solutions to several banks. This includes RuPay and RuPay Dual Interface certified payment card products. Thales is also the first in India to get certified for Visa NCMC (National Common Mobility Card).