All Public Sector Banks go live on Account Aggregator Ecosystem

August 1, 2022: The Account Aggregator Framework that seeks to empower the citizens with their data is poised to scale up rapidly, after all Public Sector Banks joined the ecosystem as Financial Information Providers. With this, customers of all 12 Public Sector Banks and 9 Private Sector Banks can now link their bank accounts to an Account Aggregator and allow sharing of data to potential Financial Information Users through an explicit and detailed consent framework.

Currently, all banks have enabled the sharing of singly held savings accounts through account aggregator, while a few have also enabled sharing of current accounts held by sole proprietorships. An estimated 1.1+ bilion bank accounts are now enabled on Account Aggregator which is more than 50 per cent  of the total bank accounts in the country.  The coverage is expected to become 100 per cent, once banks enable the sharing of all types of accounts and Regional Rural Banks, Cooperative Banks and smaller private sector banks join the Ecosystem.

Union Bank of India became the first public sector bank to go live on Account Aggregator in April 2022, followed by all other banks including State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Bank of india, Punjab National Bank, Central bank of India, Punjab & Sind Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Indian Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, UCO Bank, Canara Bank.

More than 60 entities are already live, with lenders accessing bank account data with explicit customer consent through Account Aggregators on a real time basis for retail lending, auto lending, MSME lending, New to Bank/ New to Credit lending. More than 1.2 million accounts are linked to Account Aggregators and over 1 million consent requests have been raised and successfully fulfilled. The Ecosystem is growing at a healthy monthly rate of 60-65% and is expected to grow rapidly as more banks, cross-sectoral entities and GSTN get onboarded.

Driven by policy makers and a commitment towards achieving the nation’s financial inclusion goals, Public Sector Banks completed the onboarding process in a timely manner within 8 weeks. Several of these banks are also in the process of implementing their participation in the ecosystem as users by integrating the FIU module into their loan journeys. This would further amplify the benefits of the system to the low income, rural/Tier2/Tier 3 customers, which are best served by Public Sector Banks given their unparalleled branch network and low cost of funds.