Making Financial Information Work Better for Investors
India’s capital markets have expanded significantly, bringing more households into formal investing. The next challenge is to help investors make better financial decisions by making their financial information more accessible, comprehensive and useful.
Delivering a plenary address at Sahamati’s SamvAAd 2026, Shri Tuhin Kanta Pandey, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), highlighted the role of the Account Aggregator (AA) framework in enabling more informed financial decisions and improving investor services.
From access to informed decisions
India has around 150 million unique securities market investors, a four-fold increase since FY19. Mutual fund assets have grown to approximately ₹83 trillion, reflecting the expanding participation of households in financial markets.
As financial portfolios diversify across bank deposits, equities, mutual funds, insurance and retirement savings, information often remains spread across institutions. The AA framework can help address this fragmentation by enabling secure, consent-based sharing of financial information.
Expanding the framework’s potential
SEBI has enabled depositories and asset management companies, through their registrars and transfer agents, to participate in the AA ecosystem as Financial Information Providers. This allows investors to share information on demat holdings and mutual fund investments with authorised users, with their explicit consent.
The opportunity extends to investment advisory and other investor-facing services, helping institutions move beyond individual investments towards a more comprehensive understanding of an investor’s financial position.
SEBI is also working to facilitate additional information fields for mutual funds and securities holdings, alongside the inclusion of bank deposit information in the Electronic Consolidated Account Statement (eCAS) through the AA framework. Interoperability between AAs can further enable seamless access to financial information across institutions.
Trust must underpin growth
Shri Pandey emphasised that participation alone is not the objective. Data must be accurate, comprehensive, timely and secure, while consent must be meaningful and information used only for authorised purposes.
He highlighted Sahamati’s role as a self-regulatory organisation in strengthening technical and operational standards, coordination, accountability and grievance redressal across the ecosystem.
The larger opportunity is to make financial information actionable. By combining wider access with strong safeguards, the AA framework can support better financial planning, more informed investment decisions and greater investor confidence.