Mastercard starts deleting India data stored abroad; Paytm Payments Bank swings to profit

Global card payments giant Mastercard has now started deleting data related to Indian transactions stored abroad in compliance with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) directive on data localisation, several media reports said.

The reports further stated that Mastercard will complete the process of deleting the overseas data of Indian transactions by year-end.

In October 2018, the company said that it had started storing data locally to comply with a regulatory directive that the US companies had unsuccessfully lobbied hard to do away with it.

By October-end 2018, the RBI had asked all global payment companies to store transaction data of Indian customers in the country so that the central bank could have unfettered supervisory access.

The RBI directive was part of a wider push by India to ask companies to store more of their data locally at a time when governments globally are enforcing more stringent rules to protect user data.

Paytm Payments Bank swings to profit

Paytm Payments Bank said it has swung to Rs 19 crore profit for the second year of operations that ended in March 2019. 

For the first full year of operations that ended March 2018, the company earned gross revenues of Rs 722 crore and clocked net loss of Rs 21 crore.

"As of April 2019, we have more than Rs 500 crore deposits in our savings account, which makes us the largest payments bank in India in terms of deposits. We are aiming to introduce more products and features on our platform to increase the monthly processing of savings account payments from Rs 24,000 crore to Rs 40,000 crore in 2019-20,” said Satish K Gupta, managing director and chief executive, Paytm Payments Bank.

The company claims to process over Rs 3 trillion worth of digital transactions on an annualised basis. It also offers zero-balance current accounts to individuals, sole proprietors, small and medium enterprises, and large corporates, without any restrictions on depositing/withdrawing money, number of transactions and the amount.

The payments bank came into being in 2016 when One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd, the parent of digital wallet Paytm, spun out its e-commerce and payments business under Paytm Ecommerce and Paytm Payments Bank, respectively. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of One97 Communications, owns 51% of the payments bank and One97 owns the rest.

WhatsApp tipline gets 70k requests to verify messages

WhatsApp has received over 75,000 requests from people asking the company to authenticate messages they received after the Facebook-owned messaging service launched an India tipline number for this purpose a month ago, media reports said.

The Economic Times quoted a WhatsApp spokesperson as saying that "the response on the tipline has been tremendous and has received over 75,000 claims since the launch, in five languages — Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam and English.”

Previously, a parliamentary committee had called representatives of Facebook group companies including WhatsApp and Instagram to discuss measures taken to safeguard the rights of users.

As part of its pre-election measures to counter the spread of misinformation, WhatsApp had announced a partnership with Nasscom Foundation, the social arm of National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), for digital literacy and training initiatives.