Mumbai, Oct 20 (IANS): In line with the recently issued guidelines by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to secure customers' financial data, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday launched NPCI Tokenisation system (NTS) to support tokenisation of RuPay cards as an alternative to storing card details with merchants.

The NTS will further enhance the safety of customers and provide a seamless shopping experience to consumers.

"We are confident that NPCI Tokenisation System (NTS) for tokenization of RuPay cards will instil further trust in the millions of RuPay cardholders to carry out their day-to-day transactions securely," Kunal Kalawatia, Chief of Products, National Payments Corporation of India, said in a statement.

"We believe that this unique Card-on-File (CoF) Tokenisation solution will not only safeguard customers' confidential data but will also further strengthen the overall digital payments environment," Kalawatia added.

Based on the set of guidelines that have been mandated by the RBI, sensitive customer information is to be stored in the form of an encrypted 'token' to help secure transactions.

These tokens then allow payments to be processed without disclosing the customer details or allowing the payment intermediaries to store customer data that could breach security and privacy.

NPCI's Token Reference On File (TROF) service will help millions of RuPay cardholders, maintain the security of their financial data. The card details of the customers will be completely safe & secure at the RuPay Network Secure vault.

With NTS, acquiring banks, aggregators, merchants and others can get themselves certified with NPCI and can play the role of Token Requestor to help save the Token reference number (Token Reference On File) against all card numbers saved.

Recently, digital payments firm Visa launched CoF tokenisation services in India. Visa's card tokenisation service is currently available with ecommerce platforms such as Grofers, Bigbasket and MakeMyTrip.