Uber news: Uber says won’t accept payments on Amex & Diners cards from June 28

Ride-hailing company Uber on Thursday said it will not be able to accept American Express and Diners Club cards for making payments with effect from June 28. Uber informed it’s customers that it doesn’t support card tokenisation on these cards.

As per the Reserve Bank of India’s latest order, all merchants must delete customer debit and credit card data on or before June 30 and replace card payments with unique tokens for all online, point-of-sale and in-app transactions.

“We will temporarily not be able to accept American Express & Diners Club cards as payment methods with effect on and from 28 June 2022,” Uber India said in a communication to its customers. “RBI has changed guidelines on storing card details by merchants (like Uber) for transactions in India. Merchants can only use tokenised cards for repeat transactions. We currently don’t support Network Tokenisation for American Express & Diners Club cards.”

Uber said that it is working towards onboarding the tokenisation mechanism on these cards.

“We are working on supporting these cards soon,” it said. “We encourage you to use one of the many other payment options available on the latest version of the Uber app. We still support payment through other cards (except Amex and Diners Club).”

Tokenisation is a process by which card details are replaced by a unique code or token, allowing online purchases to go through without exposing sensitive card details.

ET reported on June 6 that several large online merchants were nervous about the readiness of the ecosystem to handle transaction and tokenisation volumes, while wanting to avoid payment disruptions for consumers.

Several large merchants had told ET earlier that they were unsure about the scalability of the payments network for tokenisation, as they feared disruptions in the payment experiences of consumers.