Over the recent weeks, there is a silent yet powerful & permanent shift is taking place in Data – not just financial, even non-financial aka alternate.
DPDP is already creating an impact for financial sector including the unregulated intermediaries. Whether the impact is positive or negative depends on where one is sitting. The Citizens and REs are certainly breathing easy with “Consent” becoming mandatory at the core of any financial data sharing.
The rapid growth in adoption of AAs by Citizens who, until a year ago, were comfortable sharing bank statements in pdf form, directly to lenders or through intermediaries, are moving to trusted and secure AA rails. The table below has some strong pointers.
AA ecosystem adoption has accelerated significantly year-on-year, with cumulative consents successfully fulfilled rising from 179.3 million in March 2025 to 431.07 million in March 2026, while monthly fulfilled consents increased from 13.54 million to 22.31 million, alongside growth in FIUs from 631 to 989 and FIPs from 177 to 179.
The FIUs aka the service providers such as lenders, wealth managers, insurers, stock brokerages etc realizing the potential & growing preference of citizens, are getting themselves on the AA train,
AI & AA
As the most populous country in this world, India has the richest data set for any AI & ML enthusiast or giant to work with.
We are already witnessing a favourable alignment of stars – AI, DPDP, AA that is expected to have the cliched “Win-Win” outcome for all stakeholders. The virtuous cycle of building – training the AI models has already been unleashed with millions of citizens having shared their authentic data through the AA ecosystem.
(In the pre-AA era, REs had to depend on scraped, unreliable and at times incomplete data to decide.)
The recent tectonic shift to AI for everything under the sun is felt in the financial sector space.
Access to consented data from the source is a powerful driver for raising the financial services to next level. Institutions are already applying AI tools to better underwrite / serve their customers.
Lenders – consented access to financial data of the loan applicants and existing customers is the holy grail for Credit officers, Risk managers, Collection heads and CFOs. Running AI models on authentic financial data will help understand the behaviour, intent & ability, stress points, portfolio monitoring & rebalancing, provisioning etc. The recent explosive rise in scams including cyberfrauds etc have spawned millions of mule accounts. Use of AI to identify such accounts has been invaluable.
Wealth management was always considered to be only for people with “Wealth” or HNI/UHNI etc. Investments in Stocks directly or thru Mutual funds indirectly witnessed a upward trend from the late 2000s, primarily driven by ease of investing, transparency etc. Similar to tech companies dislodging century old industrials in the most valuable companies globally, the newer Stock brokerages such as Zerodha, Groww, Upstox etc enabled by NSE, challenged and won market shares from decades old houses.
The next wave in wealth creation and management will be ushered by a new class of wealth managers offering DIY (roboadvisory) / light touch or personalized services. India being a vastly populous country with bulk in the middle class which is aspirational to save for their next gen, wealth management at scale was inevitable.
Hyper-personalization, sachetisation of products backed by AI tools (that have already been tested and found successful) will become common place and accessible to the citizens at very low costs. For instance, the citizen can build her own financial roadmap with goals – wealth/house/vacations etc, current incomes, expected incomes. Basis her bank and assets & liability statements, the AI model can strategize and provide action plans to achieve those goals.
Possibilities are endless with AI and AA converging for a healthy financial sector and a flouring financial lifecycle for citizens.
Share your exclusive thoughts to:
editor@thefoundermedia.com
