Supreme Court gives RBI six weeks to ‘sort’ WhatsApp payments in India

MUMBAI: The Supreme Court has given the central bank six weeks to report on whether WhatsApp had complied with data localisation 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”.
This June it clarified the rules saying foreign payment firms can process transactions made in India outside of the country but the related data should be brought back for local storage within 24 hours.