Global vendors refusing credit cards issued by Indian Banks

Even as the Reserve Bank of India’s deadline to adopt tokenisation for cards nears and start-ups continue to find alternative ways to make payments, global vendors have started taking the extreme step of not accepting cards issued by Indian banks.

Recently, Chennai-based entrepreneur Nalin Narayan came in for a shock when Heroku, a platform-as-a-service (Paas) solution offering, announced discontinuing services to Indian customers citing issues with accepting subscription fee through Indian credit and debit cards.

Narayan is currently working on his CRM and marketing SaaS app for his stealth mode start-up and he had subscribed to Heroku for deploying his app and back-end infrastructure support.

“Thank you for your patience while we worked through the RBI regulation changes. Unfortunately, because of these new regulations, Heroku is unable to verify and process India issued credit cards for Heroku online customers,” Heroku said in an e-mail to Narayan. A copy of the e-mail was reviewed.

The e-mail continued, “Effective December 15, 2021, Heroku is no longer accepting credit cards issued from India banks. Customers who are unable to utilise a different credit card will have until end of January 2022 to download their data, at which point their account will be suspended and then deleted.”