New Delhi: T Rabi Sankar, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), said on Monday that customer data should be monetized responsibly and with some amount of consumer agreement.

“At a recent conference, many corporates discussed with me how they can access UPI (Unified Payments Interface) data because that will give information which could be used to structure products that can be specifically targeted at specific cohorts of the population. We will have to primarily have laws in place followed by regulations which ensure that customer data is not only safe and privacy is not only protected, but the monetisation of customer data is done in a responsible manner with some level of customer consent,” he said at an event organised by NCAER.

“Something like the data protection bill needs to be in place for large-scale usage of data.”

The Personal Data Protection Bill was withdrawn by the government from the Lok Sabha last month, and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had stated that the administration was hoping that a new piece of legislation will be passed by the next budget session of Parliament.

Although there is no gender disparity in account ownership, according to the deputy governor, there is one of roughly 17% when it comes to using such accounts to make digital payments.

“We need to use this data to bridge the gender gap. We depend immensely on the private sector in developing innovative products and in generating businesses that would enable us to achieve our policy objective while the private sector achieves its own objective of profit maximisation,” he added.

National Payments Corporation of India MD and CEO Dilip Asbe said customer experience is very important and the payment experience on a feature phone has to be better.

“Unless that is done, making the customer move from assistant mode to self-sufficiency mode is very difficult,” he added.