Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday released the framework for geo-tagging of payment system touch points to ensure proper monitoring of the availability of payment acceptance infrastructure.
Geo-tagging refers to capturing the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of payment touch points deployed by merchants to receive payments from their customers. The payment acceptance infrastructure includes Point of Sale (PoS) terminals, and Quick Response (QR) codes.
The RBI said that capturing the accurate location of existing payment system touch points/ acceptance infrastructure is essential to upscaling and chalking out intervention strategies. This requirement can be facilitated by geo-tagging of payment touch points.
According to the framework, to use geo-tagging to capture locational data of acceptance infrastructure, banks/ non-bank PSOs (payment system operators) shall capture and maintain geographical coordinates for all payment touch points.
Geo-tagging information in respect of PoS terminals (Mobile PoS, Soft PoS, Tablet PoS, Desktop PoS, Self-service Kiosk PoS, Android-based PoS terminals, Non-Android-based PoS terminals with GPRS SIM Card-embedded, Non-Android-based PoS terminals with PSTN Line Connectivity, etc) and paper-based/ Soft QR Codes (Bharat QR, UPI QR, etc.) shall be submitted to the Reserve Bank. Lenders and PSOs shall be solely responsible for ensuring data pertaining to payment touch points deployed and the merchants acquired by them is up to date and accurate.
