Accounts Aggregator Foundation Day: How Accounts Aggregator Helps Users Safely Share Financial Data

On the fourth anniversary of Accounts Aggregator Foundation Day, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) Chairman Ajay Seth hailed the use of Accounts Aggregator (AA), saying, “The AA framework has made financial data sharing safe, simple, and consent-driven.”

Pressing India’s objective of ‘Insurance for All by 2047’, Mr Seth urged insurance companies to use India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which is designed to play a key role in ensuring every Indian family’s financial protection.

The Account Aggregator (AA) framework was officially launched on September 2, 2021, establishing a secure, consent-based system for financial data sharing.

What Is the Account Aggregator Framework?

The Account Aggregator framework allows users to aggregate their financial information (like bank accounts, investments, loans, etc.) from multiple sources and share it with service providers (e.g., lenders, wealth managers) for services like loan applications or financial planning. It acts as an intermediary, ensuring data privacy and user control through encrypted, permission-driven data sharing.

The AA was recognised as a foundational Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) serving as the data exchange layer, complementing the identity (Aadhaar) and payments (UPI) layers at the G20 India Presidency in 2023.

In the G20 documents (Policy Recommendations for Advancing Financial Inclusion and Productivity Gains through Digital Public Infrastructure), its role and impact were acknowledged. And, its significance is also detailed in the “Report of India’s G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure” (July 2024).

As per government data, the Account Aggregator (AA) network was introduced as a financial data-sharing system by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in 2016. It is a Non-Bank Finance Company (NBFC) engaged in the business of providing the service of retrieving or collecting financial information about the customer. 

It also stated, “As of date, 112 Financial Institutions have gone live both as Financial Information Providers (FIP) and Financial Information Users (FIU), while 56 have gone live solely as FIP and 410 as FIU.”

“Over 2.2 billion financial accounts are now enabled for secure, consent-based data sharing through the AA framework, with 112.34 million users having already linked their accounts, “It added.

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