The RBI has been pressurising transnational organisations such Google to store data related to transaction emanating from and to India as a means to monitor the payments and settlements system. Monday’s meeting was also attended by economic affairs secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, financial services secretary Rajiv Kumar and IT secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney.

Officials said that though they had pointed out that it would be difficult for the global gateways to implement RBI’s norms so quickly, they had agreed that the RBI needed to keep a check on the gateways. Officials said the home ministry’s view all along has been that data should be processed and stored in India as it would help check suspicious transactions.

Global giants have, however, been lobbying against what they consider as a bid to coerce them to adhere to “localisation requirements”.

The Telegraph

The finance ministry would like the RBI to relax its deadline for global internet based payment gateways to adhere to its localisation norms by next Monday.

Officials said a meeting was held between finance minister Arun Jaitley and RBI deputy governor B.P. Kanungo on this as global giants such as Google, Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard had sought relaxations of both the norms and the deadline.

However, domestic payments gateways such as PayTM and security agencies such as the IB have supported the norms and hoped the RBI would stick to the deadline.

In a circular to all payment gateways, companies and banks, RBI had in April ruled that by mid-October this year, “All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India. This data should include the full end-to-end transaction details.”