Inside the chaotic race to tokenize cards

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Editor's note: Next week when many companies across the world take a break for Christmas and New Year, the payments industry in India will be working overtime—like it has for several weeks now. Thousands of developers, product managers and engineers at the largest consumer internet firms in the country will be rewriting and testing thousands of lines of code. Founders across the ecosystem will be seeking divine intervention as the world counts down to 2022. On 1 January 2022, a new payments regime for online card transactions will take effect; one that requires a complete overhaul of the payments value chain that has been in place for several years. Over the last two years, the Reserve Bank of India has issued various regulatory directions under which all online merchants and payments companies need to permanently purge every shred of customer card data stored with them. It wants this done before the year ends.  Under the rules, the RBI wants to restrict sensitive customer data to select servers hosted by regulated entities, which it can directly supervise. Only issuer banks and card networks …