RBI moves to make India's account aggregators interoperable by end-2026

Implications

Facts

Announcement: in its Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies of 7 October 2026, the RBI said it will facilitate interoperability among NBFC account aggregators, so that customers can access and share financial information from different providers through any AA of their choice. It will also help SEBI-regulated depositories add bank deposit information to the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) that demat holders receive; customers without demat accounts can obtain a consolidated view and share it through AAs. Both measures are expected to be implemented by December 31, 2026. Governor Sanjay Malhotra said users would need to onboard with only one AA, according to MediaNama.

Current arrangement: AAs are RBI-licensed NBFCs that pass customer-consented data from financial information providers (such as banks) to financial information users (such as lenders). There are 17 active AAs. ¹ Sahamati, the AA industry body, said in March 2025 that data providers are not mandated to work with all AAs, citing operational and compliance challenges; a customer whose bank is not connected to the lender's AA may have to register with a second AA. The announcement does not say how existing AA registrations and consents will carry over, or how the cost of connecting to every AA will be shared.

Scale: accounts linked through AAs reached 338.04 million by August 2026 (up 24% from 272.46 million in February 2026). ² Cumulative consents fulfilled reached 566.26 million (27.94 million new consents fulfilled in August 2026). ³ Sahamati's Credit Reimagined report estimates that loans disbursed using AA data totalled ₹3.82 lakh crore across 3.68 crore (36.8 million) loans in FY26. ⁴ That is 8.4% of retail and MSME lending by value (11.8% by number of loans). ⁵

Analysis

India built consent-based data sharing as a market of competing licensed intermediaries rather than a single utility. That produced choice, but also gaps: a lender's AA and a borrower's bank had to be connected for data to flow, and each missing link meant another registration for the customer at the point of applying for a loan. The RBI's move addresses the connection layer, not the consent model itself. With lending using AA data already at 8.4% of retail and MSME lending by value and a higher share by number of loans, the use case is mostly smaller-ticket credit, where drop-off during onboarding matters most.

Southeast Asia is earlier on the same path. The Bank of Thailand's data-sharing regulation of 30 October 2025, part of its "Your Data" project, requires supervised providers to enable sharing through standardised digital channels, starting with individual deposit account data by the end of 2026 and extending to loan and payment data between 2027 and 2028. In the Philippines, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas set its open finance framework in Circular No. 1122 (2021) and has run a pilot with voluntary participation. Neither framework has yet reached India's scale of lending use, and neither has had to fix fragmentation after the fact.

What it suggests for Southeast Asia: Thailand and the Philippines can settle interoperability in the rules before connections multiply, by requiring every data holder to connect to every licensed intermediary on common technical standards, or by keeping one shared connection layer. India is adding this years after launch. For lenders in the region, India's experience also shows where consent-based data is used first: bank-statement and cash-flow data for small loans to borrowers with little bureau history, the segment that most Southeast Asian bureaus cover least.

Counterpoints and uncertainties

The technical and legal rules for interoperability have not been published, and data providers have previously cited operational and compliance costs; if cost-sharing is unresolved, full connectivity could take longer than the December 31, 2026 target. Sahamati's lending figures are estimates from the industry body and count loans where AA data was used, not loans that could only be made with it. Thailand's and the Philippines' frameworks differ from India's in scope and governance, so India's lending share is not a forecast for either market.