RBI to establish cloud facility for financial sector

The Reserve Bank of India is working on establishing a cloud facility for the financial sector in India. The Central Bank mentioned this is a note detailing developmental and regulatory policies on December 8. The bank mentioned that in view of the increasing volume of data maintained by financial institutions, it has proposed the facility to enhance the ‘security, integrity and privacy of financial sector data’. It will also help in scalability and business continuity. The facility will be rolled out in a calibrated fashion in the medium term.

While the cloud facility will set up and initially operated by RBI’s wholly-owned subsidiary Indian Financial Technology & Allied Services (IFTAS), it will be eventually transferred to a separate entity owned by the financial sector participants.

RBI will also be setting up a fintech repository that will capture the essential information about the sector, including activities, product technology stack, and financial information, etc. “FinTechs would be encouraged to provide relevant information voluntarily to the Repository which will aid in designing appropriate policy approaches,” RBI’s statement read. The repository will be operationalised by the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub by April 2024.

To be sure, the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has empanelled the cloud services of domestic and global cloud service providers for the storage of data by the government. This year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) India received the cloud service provider (CSP) empanelment from MeitY for AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region.

The empanellment process lays down a set of mandatory categories of services to be offered by CSPs, as well as additional optional services. The government appoints an independent auditor who performs and audit and issues conformance (or lack of it) with the MeitY’s requirements. CSPs like Google, Microsoft, Yotta, Nxtra, Netmagic, and Oracle are already empanelled by MeitY.