SC wants central bank to report on WhatsApp’s compliance with local data rules

India’s top court has given the central bank six weeks to report on whether WhatsApp had complied with data localization norms as the Facebook-owned messenger gears up to launch a payments service in the country, a person involved in the matter said.

WhatsApp has been testing a peer-to-peer payments service for over a year in India, its biggest market by users, but local data storage norms have delayed an official launch.

Foreign payment companies were caught off guard last year by the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) directive that said all payments data should be stored “only in India” for “unfettered supervisory access”.