What is your perspective on how Account Aggregator (AA) will interact with future open banking and open finance frameworks in India and how is Saafe building trust and transparency in open banking?
AA, the world’s largest open finance framework, efficiently overlaps Data Privacy, Consent-management, Secure financial data exchange, One-view. As adoption expands to cover all the citizens that use Banks, Savings & Investment products, Insurance etc, AA, having trust and security as its foundational pillars, will be the default financial sector pipeline.
We, at SAAFE, always believed that approving the consent for sharing data is only a start. Towards this end, we built a best-in-class app (in Android & iOS) to help Citizens have a one-view of their financial assets and manage their consents. In addition to providing a dashboard of all their consents, features to pause, revoke consents are very important for Citizens, especially with DPDP Act. As an AA, we differentiated ourselves from others by focussing on B2C as much as B2B.
As DPDP gets fully enforced in coming quarters and years, Consent management for Citizens will take centre stage. With RBI license, AAs would benefit as a “trusted” entity unlike unregulated entities that have for years, sought access to SMS and Emails for customer service.
Complete details of consent artefact, multi-lingual features are key features of our app that ensures we serve not just India but the larger Bharat. Compliance with ecosystem guidelines are critical factors for gaining trust and ensuring transparency.
How does Saafe educate users about consent, data privacy, and control over their financial information?
In his/her journey for availing financial services, the Citizen is presented with a “Consent Artefact” which has the following details.
- Purpose of Consent
- What data is being sought
- Frequency of data fetch
- Data Life
- Validity: Tenure during which the approved consent will be triggered for data fetch
English is the default language in which we present the consent artefact, but we also have implemented in 8 Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Urdu and Marathi. This helps the diverse sections of Bharat to read and understand what they are approving.
In our extensive FAQ (available in all the 9 languages including English), we strive to educate our customers that they can reject, pause, revoke and delete consents, delink their accounts etc anytime at their choice. We also reiterate the point about us being a data blind intermediary, transporting fully encrypted data from their banker to their lender/service provider.
RBI license for AA puts at ease, concerns, if any in the minds of customers. They understand that engaging with a Regulated entity, that is subject to oversight and audits, will be secure.
What is Saafe’s approach to bridging the digital literacy gap around consent-based data sharing?
As mentioned in the previous response, SAAFE engages with citizens in 9 different languages, which helps them understand what, how, why and when. The smartphone penetration is growing by the day even in semi-urban and rural areas. Security features such as OTP and Sim-binding provide additional confidence in the citizens’ minds around AA. We will be part of a nation-wide campaign to create widespread awareness around AA, similar to RBI Kehta hai, Mutual fund sahi hai, “Insurance liya, accha kiya”. Banks and NBFCs have doubled down on nudging their channels – direct and indirect, to use AA as means for collecting financial information.
How does Saafe approach interoperability with other emerging data-sharing frameworks like ONDC or OCEN?
Financial services delivery has a host of channels for the citizens to choose from. In addition to direct integrations into FIs’ journeys, SAAFE is also integrated in ULI – Unified Lending Interface, currently run by RBIH.
Integrations with ONDC and OCEN are underway and we should be live on them within a quarter.
What strategic advantages has the dual model of NBFC-AA and TSP brought to Saafe’s clients?
Financial Institutions, like any corporate, are better placed to deal with fewer 3rd parties who can provide all solutions and services that they require. By design, SAAFE started its journey with the objective of building a reliable AA partner for Fis as Phase-I and TSP as Phase-II. After reaching critical mass in the AA venture, we commenced and completed the TSP build in a short span of 6 months. Our TSP product design is the most complete offering, drawing on our experience and noting the gaps that earlier TSPs had, in their solutions of FIs.
A TSP-AA combined offering doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. Understanding the medium / long term plans of FIs and building features to address them proactively is key. Additionally, our experience in financial services hold us in good stead for conceptualising innovative & efficient ideas.
SAAFE AA has earned strong credibility and reputation with its FI clients over the last 2 years and well-placed to leverage this goodwill for its cutting-edge TSP solutions. TSP-AA combination is invaluable for deeper, wider and broader engagement across verticals in FIs.
What opportunities do you see in embedding AA solutions into consumer-facing apps like neobanks or wealth platforms?
Being a B2B2C model, AAs have to work closely with all financial sector players, by deeply integrating with them on their web/mobile apps. Barring a small fraction, the entire business volume that have been thru the AA pipes were driven by Institutions’ journeys. AAs can only engage with Regulated entities and hence, neobanks are out of the purview. We believe that there are lot more use cases outside of financial services, that can use AA efficiently. Income tax return filings, Visa applications etc also need access to bank statements and other financial information that is currently provided by the citizen in hard copies or scanned and emailed. These processes can be made robust with AA pipes. We are exploring all the moving parts before we can approach the Regulators for their views.
