RBI mandate: Truecaller begins to host Indian consumer data locally

Truecaller claims to be one of the first international technology companies to have followed this mandate to ensure better security of its customer data.

Mobile app Truecaller announced on Wednesday that it is hosting all its Indian user data locally. The company claims to be one of the first international tech companies to have proactively taken this step to store its Indian customer data in India.

This move is in adherence with RBI’s mandate asking payment firms to store their data locally in India. Truecaller launched its payment service 'Truecaller Pay' in March 2017, in partnership with ICICI Bank.

In June 2018, the company acquired Mumbai-based startup Chillr, which was in line to go deeper into the financial services ecosystem of India. Truecaller is also reportedly planning to enter into credit business in the first quarter of 2019.

In a statement, the company also stated that it was already storing its Unified Payment Interface (UPI) data in India. Further, its payments business was built from scratch entirely out of India last year after the Chillr acquisition. This made Truecaller fully compliant to RBI’s data localisation norms from the start, compared to other international entities.

With locally stored data and significant investments in its Indian infrastructure, the company has also doubled the search result speed for its core services like 'Caller ID' and 'Spam' detection within the app to ensure that its users are protected from unwanted calls and potential fraud.

Over the past 24 months, Truecaller has heavily invested in the India market, and today, more than half of its employees are from India. It has offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Mumbai.

Speaking on the development, Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, said,

“This is one of the many steps we are taking to ensure better quality of our core services across payments, messaging and Caller ID features that Truecaller offers. This also safeguards our user’s privacy and is our way of showing commitment towards our users and their data while being compliant with laws of the geographies we operate in.”

In December, the company stated that its UPI-based payment platform Truecaller Pay was expecting to bring 25 million users on board by March 2019, organically.

According to reports, the platform was then witnessing up to 100,000 users linking their bank accounts on a daily basis, of which 50 percent were new users who were experiencing UPI for the first time.