The account aggregator (AA) ecosystem has surpassed 100 million consents on the AA framework, with about 80-90 million Indians using the system in the country, said DigiSahamati Foundation (Sahamati), the industry alliance for AA.
The number of Financial Information Providers (FIPs) and Financial Information Users (FIUs) has increased to 155 and 475, respectively, as of August 2024.
In 2023, the AA ecosystem had 146 FIPs across banks, insurance firms, and other entities, and 146 FIUs live.
“The use cases have been expanding, with FIUs using AA for streamlined tasks like customer onboarding to specialised tasks like controlling frauds,” said B.G. Mahesh, chief executive officer (CEO) of Sahamati.
Consent requests have grown from 5.5 million in financial year 2023 (FY23) to 63.75 million in FY24, Mahesh added.
AA consents grew by 1,059 per cent, signifying the phenomenal adoption and inroads of Open Finance in India. This also makes India’s AA ecosystem the fastest-growing Open Finance ecosystem in the world, said Sahamati.
In India, AAs act as consent managers that operate independently of FIUs, allowing users and businesses to consensually share their financial data and manage consents in one place.
AAs use technology to ensure there is a secure exchange of data between financial institutions like banks, insurance agencies, or mutual fund companies.
The data can only be shared after securing a customer’s consent, following which it can be used to access financial services.
AA collects a user’s digital financial data from one or multiple accounts and shares it with a financial institution that may provide services such as loans or insurance. Mahesh added that the usage has expanded from the basic use case of underwriting loans to personal finance management, portfolio management, assessing early warning signals, and monitoring of loan accounts, loan collections, issuance of insurance policies, opening of demat accounts, and investment advisory.
An FIU and an FIP are major components of the AA ecosystem. FIPs are institutions that store user data, such as banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), and depositories. They share a customer’s financial information with an FIU through requests generated by an AA.
Setu AA by Agya Technologies, PhonePe, Anumati by Perfios Account Aggregator Services, are some of the 15 companies that have a licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an NBFC-AA.
First Published: Aug 20 2024 | 5:02 PM IST
