RuPay goes live on CVV-less payments for tokenized cards

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Monday said RuPay has now introduced the CVV (Card Verification Value) free payment experience for its debit, credit and prepaid cardholders who have tokenized their cards on the merchant application or webpage.

This new CVV-less experience ensures that the cardholder will not have to reach out to their wallet or remember any card details, if they have saved (tokenized) their card on the ecommerce merchant which supports this feature, NPCI said in a statement.

Tokenization is a simple technology to secure card transactions without sharing the clear or real card details with the merchants.


When a cardholder opts to save their card for a domestic ecommerce transaction, they authenticate the transaction through the card details (Card number, CVV, Card expiry date) as a one time activity followed by entering the OTP (two-factor authentication), the details are then Tokenized and saved with the merchant, it said.

This safeguards the card details of the customer from cyber frauds as real details are not saved with the merchant.

The merchants live for CVV-less payments, for the subsequent transactions customer can complete the payment by just entering the OTP without the need to enter the CVV or other card details again, it said.

RuPay, the homegrown card network developed by NPCI, went live on Card on File Tokenization in 2021, in line with RBI's guidelines, for its domestic ecommerce transactions to ensure better security for all its cardholders.