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India Lifts Ban on Mastercard (techcrunch.com) 24

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
India has lifted business restrictions on Mastercard, nearly a year after imposing the ban, once again allowing the cards giant to add new customers in the South Asian market after it demonstrated "satisfactory compliance" with the local data storage rules, the central bank said on Thursday. From a report: In a series of moves last year, the Reserve Bank of India indefinitely barred Mastercard, American Express and Diners Club from issuing new debit, credit or prepaid cards to customers over noncompliance with local data storage rules. The business restrictions on American Express and Diners Club remain in place in the country, though they are permitted to continue to serve their existing customer base. The report adds: Unveiled in 2018, the local data-storage rules require payments firms to store all Indian transaction data within servers in the country. Visa, Mastercard and several other firms, as well as the U.S. government, previously requested New Delhi to reconsider its rules, which they argued were designed to allow the regulator "unfettered supervisory access."
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India Lifts Ban on Mastercard More

India Lifts Ban on Mastercard

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  • This is all posturing. EMVCo - i.e. Visa / Mastercard / Amex - are a virtual monopoly, have a complete stranglehold on almost all cashless payment methods on the planet, and decide what goes and how it goes on their network. If you're kicked off their network, in this day and age, you're in deep trouble, whether you're a business or a country.

    This is just Mastercard trying to appear as if they care about the law.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 )
      India can do something. And India has done something. This is Mastercard begging to get back in, to contain what India has done to India.

      The micro payment infrastructure in India is amazing and incredible, makes you wonder why you don't have it in more "advanced" countries. Even road side vendors selling coconut water or costermongers hawking lemon-water (nimbu-pani) teeny weeny grocery stores, accept payment using the QRcodes. From rickshaw-wallahs to street beggers everyone seem to be carrying around a

      • The very last thing I want in my life is to provide access to my bank account to anyone, for any reason, let alone to conduct 10 cent micro transactions.

        Fuck all that.

        I don't even carry a debit card in my wallet.

      • The very last thing I want in my life is to provide access to my bank account to anyone, for any reason, let alone to conduct 10 cent micro transactions.

        Fuck all that.

      • The two billion people mentioned here includes the entire market of Hindustan Lever, all of south Asia. And I was wrong to say Hindustan Lever bought Unilever. Tatas bought Lipton and Jaguar. But looks like Unilever is not Indian owned, not yet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Corbets ( 169101 )

        Other countries do have this. Denmark introduced MobilePay (leveraging our Dankort or a credit card, as you like) for small exchanges between individuals or as payments to businesses, a decade or more ago. It’s wildly successful. Even as an American who only came over recently, I tend to use it to pay instead of any other system / card, though occasionally I do use Apple Pay as well.

      • Not sure what your smoking there friend but the USA designed and developed those transaction types India is just now catching up.

        The Girl Scouts have sold thin mints via chip and pin readers door to door for over a decade.
        Every vendor in the US has a card reader.

    • UPI (unified payments interface) has way more volumes than Visa/MC apart from being quite futuristic compared to the 50 yo Visa/MC tech.

      Basically every bank account has an email ID type identifier and all types of apps use the open API to instantly move money from one account to any other. The implementation is good enough that it will take you days to believe how can something be so simple and secure! Seriously. Now also being used by Singapore, France, UAE etc. No stupid % charges. Usually free and someti

    • I suggest you take a few minutes and learn about UPI, how many transactions take place per day, and how the total value of transactions per month.

      I also suggest your learn about RuPay.

  • Welcome to international business (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday June 17, 2022 @06:24AM (#62627326)

    If you want to do business internationally, you have to abide by their laws, hire employees who will work based on their cultural norms. And you are doing business with them as long it is to their benefit.

    The United States of America is a very business friendly country, however it too has laws and regulations that might make a foreign company to have difficulty working with the USA. Be it a huge moral conundrum where American Morals and laws around morality are in conflict with the businesses. Us loose anti-competitive laws, that make it very difficult for a smaller business to get a foot hold where there is a major business in that market...

    India, has the second largest population on the planet. You can get a lot of customers. However, India isn't the US, and you can't expect a US Firm coming into India doing things their own way, and they will be happy about it.

    • There are also laws, and company guidelines, to adhere to ethical standards. These include not paying bribes. That alone makes doing business in many countries very difficult when there is corruption and bribery as a part of daily life.

      The snag is "do things our way" wont' work, if "our way" means paying bribes or acting unethically. This means zero donations to local politicians, no hiring of friends of politicians, no payments to speed things out of customs, no payments to officials to get a building s

  • All hell will break loose when they through the Zuck out of the window.

  • it's comical how people get so freaked out over microsoft or facebook or google having all their data, how they casually ignore the laws in almost every country that require all that data to be "accessible" by the government.

    I can assure you, the fbi/kgb/mossad/whoever it is in your country that does national surveillance has A LOT more on you than anyone you're currently worrying about, because they push the laws that insure that is always the case.

    That, and mosts of these agencies are FAR less transparent

  • So data must be stored within the country. I'm guessing encrypting the data will be fine? After all, this is just about protecting your citizens and you want everything to be as secure as possible, right? Of course the actual processing of the data can be done back at HQ where the encryption keys will be held, or is there some other reason you want the data stored within control of your courts?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      I am pretty sure I had read at the time that the Indian bill that introduced this requirement did not claim it was for protecting the citizen data, but for giving access to the data to authorities. It's a bit like the opposite of the GDPR - you have to gather all the data and store it right here where we can see them (and you'd have to decrypt them if the Indian authorities ask you to).

  • Although it is being sold locally as protecting data from being shipped out of the country, it is more about forcing these behemoth international companies to build and maintain Indian brick and mortar facilities.

    FWIW, it's not solely an Indian phenomenon. Wherever and whenever a multinational company takes assets out of the country, locals feel better about it if some local industry and jobs benefit from it.

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