India’s Account Aggregators cross 100 mn consents, to reach 30 pc of population by FY25

Bengaluru, Aug 20 – In a remarkable achievement of the country’s fintech ecosystem, total number of successful consents on the Account Aggregator (AA) framework has crossed 100 million in three years (as of August 15) , a report said on Tuesday.

About 80-90 million people are using AA in India, which translates to nearly 8 per cent of the adult population, according to DigiSahamati Foundation (Sahamati), an industry alliance for the AA ecosystem,

In FY24, AA consents grew by 1,059 per cent, which signifies the phenomenal adoption and inroads of open finance in India, making it the fastest-growing open finance ecosystem in the world.

According to the report, the current usage and penetration of open finance/AA Framework is expected to achieve a penetration of 25-30 per cent of the Indian population by the end of FY25.

“The use cases have been expanding with FIUs (financial Intelligence Units) using AA for streamlined tasks like customer onboarding to specialised tasks like controlling frauds,” informed BG Mahesh, CEO, Sahamati.

Growth in consent requests from 5.5 million in FY 2022-23 to 63.75 million in FY 2023-24 by customers “indicates a higher degree of comfort and acceptance of the system,” he added.

The AA network has been introduced as a financial data-sharing system by Reserve Bank of India (RBI). AA is non-bank finance company (NBFC) engaged in the business of providing the service of retrieving or collecting financial information pertaining to the customer.

Open Finance is defined as a framework that allows customers to share their financial data with third-party providers, enabling the development of new financial products and services.

“Our goal is to make AA accessible to customers in the remotest parts of India, democratising financial services and data sharing,” said Mahesh.

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.