Account Aggregator (AA) provider OneMoney will onboard five banks by the end of next month and expects to see its integration across various FIs, government and industry-led digital projects to take place in the coming months, Krishna Prasad, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Finsec AA Solutions, which runs OneMoney, told MediaNama.
OneMoney recently launched the beta version of its Account Aggregator mobile app on Google’s Android Play Store, the first AA operator to do so. “We have on-boarded IndusInd Bank, Axis Bank and Bajaj Finserv as of now of the FIP side. In the next month or two the Financial Information User (FIU) side of the AA ecosystem will be in place, as we need to embed the AA framework in the user-journey across each use-case, like vehicle loans, home loans and many others,” Prasad said.
Progress on rolling out AA services has taken time since banks and other financial companies need to build consent layers within their operations. As of date only a handful of banks and non-banks are working on it and only three of them have registered themselves on the Financial Information Provider side of the framework. While the FIP arm of the company is responsible for sending customer information, the FIU of the AA system consumes it in order to provide services to the customer. At present since the system is not populated by banks on either side, independent use by consumers will take at least few months’ time.
“There have to be sufficient number of FIPs active before they onboard as FIUs and generate a vibrant financial ecosystem,” Prasad said. He says that ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and the State Bank of India are expected to go live by end-February and said that they are undergoing a certification process for each of their integrations. “We will be integrating OneMoney-AA into the Sahay BHIM system by the end of this month and it should be ready by end of February,” he added.
Essentially, the AA system allows banks and financial companies to share customer information across various services based on the users’ consent. It is one of the ‘data rails’ in addition to the National Health Stack as envisaged under the India Stack project which includes Aadhaar, DigiLocker and others. Onemoney is one of the licensed entities, by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to act as intermediaries between consumers and their data.
In the case of a bank depositor/borrower, the AA’s will pull the information from one bank and transfer it to another bank or financial institution. Over time the system hopes to ensure that all financial institutions can access 18 classes of financial information, as per the RBI’s guideline. The AA’s on their part provide customers with a mobile or desktop interface and manage consent flows. They, however, are barred from accessing or storing the information being transmitted between financial companies.
The IndiaStack project has also developed the Open Credit Enablement Network which is a ‘credit rail’ to deliver loans through a uniform process giving borrowers access to all lenders through a similar consent architecture or data rail. The first iteration of OCEN is to enable credit to micro-small-medium enterprises on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), through the Sahay GeM. AAs will play the role of consent managers to provide a flow of information between these businesses and their lenders for credit against orders placed by the government on the port.
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