RuPay introduces CVV-less payments for tokenised debit, credit and prepaid cards

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Monday said that India’s own homegrown card network — RuPay — has now introduced the CVV (Card Verification Value) free payment experience for its debit, credit and prepaid cardholders who have tokenized their cards on the merchant application or webpage.

This new CVV-less experience ensures that the cardholder will not have to reach out to their wallet or remember any card details, if they have saved (tokenized) their card on the ecommerce merchant which supports this feature, NPCI said in a statement.

What is Tokenization?

Tokenization is a simple technology to secure card transactions without sharing the clear or real card details with the merchants. Whenever a cardholder opts to save their card for a domestic ecommerce transaction, they authenticate the transaction through the card details (Card number, CVV, Card expiry date) as a one time activity followed by entering the OTP (two-factor authentication), the details are then Tokenized and saved with the merchant, it said.

This safeguards the card details of the customer from cyber frauds as real details are not saved with the merchant.

The merchants live for CVV-less payments, for the subsequent transactions customer can complete the payment by just entering the OTP without the need to enter the CVV or other card details again, it said.

This feature has been made live along with RazorPay for merchants like Rapido, Porter, etc. RuPay is further working with major aggregators/gateways like PayU, CyberSource, Firstdata, Paytm, etc to extend this feature to other merchants.

Commenting on this development, Denny Thomas, Head of RuPay, said, “Our vision has always been to ensure effortless payments for all our RuPay cardholders without compromising on the security aspect. Having worked with the payments industry extensively for implementation of Card on File Tokenization, which ensures utmost security of sensitive card information, now we are aiming at making the payment experience of a tokenized card seamless.”

RuPay, the homegrown card network developed by NPCI, went live on Card on File Tokenization in 2021, in line with RBI’s guidelines, for its domestic ecommerce transactions to ensure better security for all its cardholders.