Every day, more Indians are embracing the Account Aggregator (AA) framework. By July 2026, it has already enabled more than 2,887 million accounts and powered over 1972 million consents. These numbers reflect an ecosystem that has moved beyond promise to real-world impact. And this is just the beginning.
For consumers seeking faster, more streamlined access to financial services, the AA framework helps them cut through red tape and reshare financial information across multiple organisations seamlessly, just with one click or a single consent. For financial institutions across banking, lending, insurance and capital markets, AA is enabling faster, more informed and customer-centric decisions. What began as a new way to share financial information has evolved into a foundation for reimagining how financial services are experienced.
The question is no longer simply about building infrastructure or even whether Open Finance will work. The next phase is about turning that foundation into products and services that solve real-world problems.
This is where Sahamati’s Financial Services Innovation Challenge at SamvAAd 2026 comes in. As the curtains rise on India’s biggest AA community event, the challenge is showcasing the country’s most innovative products built using Open Finance data.
Why This Is the Right Moment for Innovation
Today, the AA ecosystem has facilitated the delivery of over 3.76 crore financial products and services in the capital markets and insurance industry. Many of these are uniquely combining innovation with technology to reshape India’s financial services landscape.
These innovations are already beginning to emerge. Take the wealth management platform Sigfyn, which is using AI to help its customers understand their money, finance, and investments better. The company has made it possible for them to identify idle cash and increase their monthly investments by as much as 50%.
The impact extends well beyond wealth management. India’s leading online insurance platform Policybazaar, is using the AA framework to streamline financial underwriting and strengthen industry-wide digital distribution. And Insurance distributor Aditya Birla Capital Digital is also driving contextual insurance journeys by including a “My Track” feature that allows stage-appropriate insurance reminders. The feature makes it 6X more likely for customers to explore beneficial insurance offers.
The questions before AA innovators are clearly no longer theoretical ones for tomorrow. They are practical challenges waiting for practical solutions today.
Introducing the Financial Services Innovation Challenge
Innovation is the need of the hour. And to celebrate and accelerate such ideas, whether they are customer-facing financial solutions or B2B products and platforms, Sahamati has announced the Financial Services Innovation Challenge.
The goal is to encourage practical solutions for real-world problems, while providing a platform for innovators to engage directly with senior ecosystem stakeholders. The innovations showcased could have wide-ranging applications, from improving customer access to enhancing financial outcomes and helping institutions operate more efficiently.
Importantly, the challenge is designed to encourage innovation at different stages of maturity. Solutions at the pilot stage will be evaluated separately from products already operating at scale, ensuring promising early-stage innovators compete alongside their peers while established organisations are assessed on demonstrated impact and execution. This approach recognises that meaningful innovation can emerge at any stage of the product journey.
Six winning solutions will be recognised across three challenge themes, with each winner receiving a cash prize of ₹1 lakh and the opportunity to present their work live at SamvAAd 2026 before a distinguished audience of regulators, financial institutions, fintech leaders and ecosystem stakeholders.
Is Your Solution Secure, Efficient, and Scalable?
To recognise the breadth of innovation taking place across the ecosystem, the challenge is organised around three themes that represent the future of Open Finance innovation.
Expanding Financial Service Access celebrates customer-facing solutions that improve inclusion, financial access and user experience through Open Finance.
Engineering the Financial Backbone recognises technologies that help financial institutions strengthen decision-making, improve risk management, streamline operations and build more resilient financial systems.
Finally, Imagining the Next Data Layer invites participants to look beyond today’s ecosystem. As new categories of consented financial data become available in the future, what entirely new products, services and customer journeys could become possible? From prototypes to visionary concepts, this category encourages innovators to think beyond today’s boundaries and explore tomorrow’s opportunities.
Build What Comes Tomorrow, Today
India’s Open Finance journey has reached an exciting milestone. The infrastructure is maturing, adoption continues to grow, and institutions are increasingly embracing consent-based data sharing to create better financial experiences.
The next breakthroughs, however, will not come from infrastructure alone. They will come from innovators who see possibilities where others see processes, who identify unmet needs and who build solutions that make financial services smarter, more inclusive and more accessible
If you are building an MVP, scaling a live product or developing a forward-looking solution that pushes the boundaries of Open Finance, the Financial Services Innovation Challenge 2026 is your opportunity to demonstrate what is possible.
The future of financial services is already being built. This is your chance to help shape it
Apply Here- https://samvaad.sahamati.org.in/participation_form.php