The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday directed banks and non-bank payment system operators to maintain and submit to the regulator geographical coordinates and other details of their payment touchpoints.
The new norms, which have been released as the framework for geo-tagging of payment system touch points, intends to assess the distribution of digital payment facilities across the country. RBI believes that capturing the accurate location of existing payment infrastructure is necessary to form future strategy and intervene when required. It had announced plans on geo-tagging in its Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies released on 8 October last year.
Geo-tagging in this case refers to capturing the geographical coordinates of touch points used by merchants to receive payments from customers. This has various benefits such as providing insights on regional penetration of digital payments, monitoring infrastructure density across different locations, and identifying the scope for additional payment touch points, RBI said.
Payment systems covered under this include point of sale (PoS) terminals and QR codes infrastructure. Operators would have to submit contact details of their individual nodal officers for this activity to RBI by 31 March, and the regulator would then allow them access to its Centralized Information Management System (CIMS) to submit the required information.
Payment operators would now have to collect two kinds of data, including information related to merchants and data on the infrastructure deployed. Merchant details would include name, contact details, and merchant location details, while infrastructure details would mean general payment touch point details and touch point location details.
