The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has released the framework for geotagging of payment system touchpoints to help monitor and ensure the availability of payment infrastructure.
Salient Features and objectives
- It will allow for accurate availability monitoring of payment acceptance infrastructures, such as Points of Sale (PoS) terminals and Quick Response (QR) codes.
- Such monitoring would let policymakers intervene to improve payment infrastructure distribution. Banks and non-bank payment system operators (PSOs) will acquire and preserve geographic coordinates for all payment touchpoints, according to the framework.
- They will keep track of all payment touchpoints around the country, including merchant information and payment acceptance infrastructure details, in a register.
- Geotagging information will be submitted to the RBI for PoS terminals, such as 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, and paper-based and soft QR codes such as Bharat QR, UPI QR.
What is Geo-tagging?
- Geo-tagging refers to capturing the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of payment touch points deployed by merchants to receive payments from their customers.
