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RBI announces Technical Specifications for all participants of the Account Aggregator (AA) ecosystem

10 Nov 2019

In a notification on November 8 2019, the RBI’s announced the Technical Specifications for the Account Aggregator system. The notification can be accessed here.

Earlier, the RBI published the “Non-Banking Financial Company – Account Aggregator (Reserve Bank) Directions, 2016” on September 6, 2016.

Reserve Bank Information Technology Private Limited (ReBIT), has framed these specifications. The NBFC -Account Aggregator (AA) API Specification is available here (download the PDF). All the three players in the AA ecosystem – NBFC-AA or Financial Information Providers (FIP) or Financial Information Users (FIU) are required to adopt to the technical specifications published by ReBIT.

It is important for all players (AAs, FIPs etc)

  1. to strictly adhere to the specs as they build
  2. to give feedback and help update the specs by which we make it more usable and secure going forward.

We should use the AA technical framework to create the most powerful consented-data sharing system that the world has ever seen.

Why Is The AA Tech Specification Significant

India is probably the only country that has detailed data APIs and financial information schemas (20+) as a country-wide standard. This significant because of the interoperability it brings and hence opens the opportunity for a number of great applications to be built on top of it.

Financial Information Users (FIUs) are looking at building apps for the following four Use Cases in the AA ecosystem,

  1. Lending
  2. Personal Finance Management
  3. Wealth Management
  4. Robo Advisory

Product companies can come up with many more new and innovative Use Cases which were not possible before the era of Account Aggregators.

And there’s no reason why this ‘Make in India’ technical specification can’t become a standard for the rest of the world.

Also see,