Check If Your Payment Gateway In India Meets These 5 Essential Security Standards

India's payment ecosystem has scaled at breathtaking speed over the last few years. Transaction volumes jumped from 3,248 crore in 2019 to 20,849 crore in 2024.

At this scale, every weakness in your checkout stack becomes a direct risk to revenue, trust and regulatory scrutiny. Before you shortlist any payment gateway in India, it helps to check whether its security standards can scale with your ambitions.

Let's break down five essential security standards that help teams protect customers, reduce fraud and keep every transaction resilient.

5 essential security standards for your payment gateway in India

Before you review features or pricing, check whether your payment gateway in India satisfies these core security standards for safe transactions. They act as a baseline checklist that protects sensitive data, reduces fraud risk and keeps regulators, partners and customers confident.

1. PCI DSS compliance and strong encryption by default

Every payment gateway in India that handles card details should follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). PCI DSS establishes minimum controls for storing, processing and transmitting cardholder data, reducing the risk of breaches and large-scale fraud.

Check whether your provider undergoes external PCI audits, maintains segmentation between card data systems and general IT and enforces least privilege.

If your team never sees security test reports or how issues were fixed, consider it a serious warning sign.

2. Alignment with RBI directions for payment aggregators and gateways

RBI regulates payment aggregators and payment gateways to ensure safe online transactions and strong governance across the ecosystem. Any payment gateway in India should demonstrate compliance with Master Directions on Payment Aggregators, including security, escrow and audit requirements.

Ask whether they have a Board-approved information security policy, mapped to RBI's cyber resilience and digital payment security directions. You should know how the payment gateway handles escrow accounts, settlement timelines and reconciliation, because failures here create exposure.

Insist on seeing summaries of recent regulatory or external security audits and understand how findings were closed across technology and operations. Also, RBI's data localisation rules require that all payment system data for Indian transactions be stored only within India, with limited exceptions.

Your payment gateway in India should show where its primary and backup data centres sit and which jurisdictions apply. Look for documented security monitoring, including centralised logging, anomaly detection and alerting that covers applications, infrastructure and third-party integrations.

3. Strong customer authentication and dynamic risk checks

From April 2026, RBI's Authentication Directions require at least two factors for almost all domestic digital payments, with one dynamic factor. Your payment gateway in India must already be preparing for this regime, supporting biometrics, device tokens or passphrases alongside one-time passwords.

Equally important, the provider should support risk-based authentication, stepping up checks only when behaviour or transaction context looks suspicious. Ask whether the payment gateway in India allows issuers to run velocity checks, device fingerprinting and analysis across card-not-present transactions. 

Well-implemented authentication protects customers while keeping genuine transactions quick, which is crucial as fraud tactics grow more sophisticated.

4. Tokenisation and minimal storage of sensitive card data

Tokenisation is a security process that replaces actual card numbers with random, unique tokens. These tokens can be used for transactions without exposing the original card data, reducing the risk of fraud and data breaches. RBI's tokenisation framework now prohibits many merchants and intermediaries from storing raw card numbers, pushing the ecosystem towards secure tokens. 

A secure payment gateway in India should support card-on-file tokenisation across networks and issuers for cards saved on your platform.

It should also make sure sensitive authentication data never passes through your servers in plain text, using encryption and token vaults instead.

Confirm that the payment gateway has completed certifications for tokenisation and does not allow merchants to work around for card storage. Ask where tokens, keys and related logs are stored, who can access them and how those access rights are reviewed over time.

5. 3D Secure compliance for essential fraud detection

3D Secure is an additional security layer for online card payments that requires customers to verify their identity during checkout, usually via one-time passwords, app approval or biometric authentication.

This approach effectively prevents fraud. If card details are compromised, fraudsters cannot complete transactions without the cardholder's secondary verification. Only the legitimate cardholder can authorise payment.

3D Secure also benefits merchants by shifting fraud liability to issuers in many cases. Customers gain confidence that their purchases are protected, increasing conversion rates and repeat business.

Your payment gateway should support 3D Secure 2.0 across all card networks. This ensures compliance with RBI authentication requirements while securing customer trust and protecting your business from chargebacks.

A resilient payment gateway in India will also run incident response drills, with clear runbooks tying technology events back to business communications. Ask when they last simulated a breach, how quickly they notified affected merchants and what permanent fixes followed that exercise.

Prioritise security first when selecting your next gateway

Security is now as central to revenue as pricing or user experience, because every breach or outage immediately erodes customer trust. When you scale with a payment gateway in India that treats security as foundational, every new customer touchpoint stays protected by design.

By checking PCI DSS, RBI alignment, strong authentication, tokenisation and localisation, you reduce risk while still supporting ambitious digital growth. Partners such as Pine Labs Online can help you meet these standards while delivering seamless checkouts, reliable settlements and richer analytics.

This combination frees your teams to focus on product and growth rather than constantly reacting to preventable payment incidents. Now is the right moment to review your stack and move decisively towards a security-first infrastructure that keeps every transaction safe.