In April 2018, the Indian central bank demanded from companies such as Mastercard, Visa and American Express to store their payments data “only in India” so that the regulator could have “unfettered supervisory access”, starting with October 2018.

Despite the companies opposed this decision, saying that these rules would increase their infrastructure costs, hit their global fraud detection platforms, and affect planned investments in India, their requests were declined.

Mastercard has started storing all its new payments transaction data in India at its technology centre in the western city of Pune. However, it did not specify whether a copy of that data was still being stored abroad. The company said it has submitted a proposal with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for “storage of data only in India within a specified timeframe”. It did not give a timeline.

Visa too has started storing a copy of its new transaction data locally and had sought time from the RBI to comply with the requirement to store Indian data only within the country. Visa and American Express did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the online publication added.