Paytm lambasts Google Pay over sharing financial data to third parties and affiliates

Continuing its tirade against foreign payments firm over data localisation and privacy concerns, home-grown digital payments player Paytm has once again lambasted Google and alleging that its payments arm Google Pay is sharing financial data to third parties and affiliates.

Paytm has written to the National Payments Corporation of India saying that Google Pay is an unregulated platform and it has the scope of using its customers' data for monetary gains with complete disregard for the users’ need for privacy, reports ET.

Denying all allegation by the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led firm, Google's spokesperson clarified that it does not use any individual UPI transactions data for any monetisation purpose e.g. for advertisements.

The development comes on the heels of PhonePe's recent remarks on the global search giant over moving data centres to India. The Flipkart-owned payments platform also favoured RBI guidelines for the level playing field.

Earlier, this week, RBI also directed Google Pay to store data on local servers. The bank regulator, which had given a six-month deadline in April to all payments players had written to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to pressurise Google Pay to follow the regulatory norms.

Not only Google Pay, but Facebook-owned WhatsApp has already faced the wrath of Paytm in the recent past. WhatsApp, which has been trying to enter UPI ecosystem has so far restricted by the government over its local presence and data servers.

Paytm, which has been vociferously supporting data localisation policy, is also trying to influence industry bodies such as IAMAI that have so far not supported the case.

Meanwhile, the Paytm's prime investor and China's e-commerce giant Alibaba has backed India's data localisation plan for e-commerce companies operating in the country, saying the company respects "data security and privacy".