“Regulatory requirements in India apply to the processing of recurring transactions. If you hold an Indian debit or credit card and you have a subscription, these changes impact your transactions. Some transactions might be declined by banks and card issuers," Apple’s statement on its India billing page says.
It further clarified that users will need to pay via their Apple ID balance in the country. In India, users can pay for the same through App Store codes, net banking or unified payments interface (UPI).
Over the past two months, numerous users have taken to social media platforms to complain about not being able to pay for subscriptions or apps with previously saved debit and credit cards on their Apple ID.
The incident comes after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced mandatory tokenisation of saved card on file (CoF) data to be done by merchants, in order to continue accepting recurring payments for subscriptions. After multiple extensions, the present deadline for companies in India to enable tokenization of cards in order to save debit and credit card information on file stands as June 30, 2022.
The move affects recurring payments made in India, and multiple companies have already informed users about this change. Services such as Netflix, which rely entirely on user subscriptions, have already made changes to adapt to the new regulations in India.
The latter, for instance, rolled out support for UPI autopay for its Indian customers in September 2021. The feature itself was introduced by the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) to replace the need for users to save their card data on platforms.
The RBI has previously stated that the new regulations around autopay for credit and debit cards in India would help prevent cyber frauds and theft of financial data from platforms, which occur due to data breaches.
