The Reserve Bank of India has formally recognised the Sahamati Foundation as the Self-Regulatory Organisation (SRO) for India’s Account Aggregator ecosystem, a move designed to strengthen governance and build greater trust in the country’s rapidly expanding open finance infrastructure. The decision hands Sahamati oversight responsibilities over an ecosystem that has become central to India’s data-sharing architecture for credit, lending and financial planning services.
What the Account Aggregator Framework Does
India’s Account Aggregator (AA) system, built as a consent-based financial data-sharing framework, allows individuals and businesses to securely share their financial information — bank statements, tax records, insurance and investment data — across institutions without manual document submission. Since its rollout, the framework has been positioned as a foundational layer of India’s broader digital public infrastructure stack, complementing the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the India Stack more broadly, with the goal of making credit underwriting faster, cheaper and more inclusive, particularly for small businesses and first-time borrowers with thin credit files.
As adoption of the AA framework has scaled, involving an increasing number of banks, non-banking financial companies, fintech lenders and data-sharing intermediaries, regulators have sought a more robust self-regulatory layer to standardise practices, resolve disputes, and ensure consistent consumer protection standards across participants — a role now formally assigned to Sahamati.
Why Self-Regulation Matters for Open Finance
Self-regulatory organisations occupy an important middle layer in India’s financial regulatory architecture, allowing the RBI to delegate day-to-day industry coordination, technical standard-setting and grievance redressal to a body with deep sectoral expertise, while retaining ultimate supervisory authority. For the Account Aggregator ecosystem specifically, this is particularly significant given the framework’s reliance on a large and growing number of technology intermediaries whose compliance practices need consistent monitoring to maintain consumer trust in data-sharing.
Financial sector analysts note that robust self-regulation is often viewed as a prerequisite for scaling consent-based data infrastructure responsibly, since any high-profile data misuse incident could set back adoption significantly, given how sensitive financial information is by nature. Sahamati’s elevation to formal SRO status is expected to bring clearer accountability structures, standardised technical protocols and more consistent enforcement of participant obligations across the ecosystem.
Market and Industry Reaction
Fintech industry bodies have welcomed the recognition, framing it as a maturation milestone for India’s open finance journey. Lenders and account aggregator technology providers say clearer governance should help accelerate onboarding of new financial information users and providers, while giving consumers greater confidence in sharing sensitive financial data through the framework. As India continues to position its digital public infrastructure model as a template being studied by other emerging economies, the strengthening of self-regulatory oversight for the AA ecosystem is likely to be viewed as an important governance milestone, reinforcing the credibility of the broader open finance architecture as it scales toward mainstream adoption across retail and small business lending.
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