ANUMATI: Much more than bank statements

Srikanth Rajagopalan

Updated on May 11, 2023

Over the past few years, adoption of digital apps for entertainment, communication, commerce, and payments has exploded. This has created a wealth of digital data that can be used in innovative ways to delight customers through the use of account aggregators.

A key area of innovation is in financial services, especially lending. Millions of aspiring customers are seeking credit for the first time. They cannot be served using traditional models of credit scoring using bureaux and collateral. These techniques look into the rear-view mirror and try to use historical data to predict future behaviour. There are several flaws in this approach, but two stand out (a) a customer’s economic situation is changing far more rapidly today than even two years ago. A static view of the customer using very narrow data points such as credit scores is out of touch with reality (b) there is huge pent-up demand from new-to-credit customers whose only collateral is their data. We need an approach that looks through the windshield to see the way forward in a fast-changing world.

Enter digital lending apps which took a very innovative approach to harvesting and mining customer data to underwrite and keep track of repayments. Unfortunately, some apps turned out to be malicious and caused more customer harm than good.

In September 2022, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) came out with Guidelines on Digital Lending that clearly spelt out the roles of Regulated Entities (REs) such as banks and Lending Service Providers (LSPs) such as digital apps. Tellingly, a key focus area of the Guidelines is on the collection, usage and sharing of customer data. In particular, the RBI mandates that:

  1. Only REs can collect customer data
  2. REs should prove “prior and explicit consent of the borrower having audit trail”. 
  3. The borrower shall be provided with an option to give or deny consent for use of specific data, restrict disclosure to third parties, data retention, revoke consent already granted to collect personal data and if required, make the app delete/ forget the data.
  4. The purpose of obtaining borrowers’ consent needs to be disclosed at each stage of interface with the borrowers.

Enters Account Aggregators

If you’re familiar with the Account Aggregator architecture, this should be instantly familiar! If you are a Regulated Entity and seek to comply with these Guidelines, your easiest and most scalable mechanism is Anumati. Today, we serve customers of over 33 FIPs, collectively representing over a billion individual accounts.

We also recognise that as a RE you seek to partner with LSPs that bring unique complementary capabilities for you to scale your business. The key to gaining customer trust when their primary interface is an LSP app is to show customers that the service is being provided by a RE, and that the customer’s data is available only to the RE.

Anumati offers several convenient additional features to help you work with LSPs at scale.

In partnership with Perfios Software, Anumati is bundled into Perfios Credit Gateway (PCG). PCG is a unique gateway that allows REs to integrate once with a gateway service and quickly deploy across approved digital lending apps, marketplaces such as e-commerce platforms, and other demand aggregators. PCG is certified for compliance with OCEN standards and is in discussions to plug into protocols such as ONDC.

Anumati is more than just another way to fetch bank statements. Anumati is your gateway to a range of data sources and solutions that allow you to scale your business while being compliant with RBI guidelines and earning customer trust each step of the way.

Anumati: Your Data. Your Consent. Your Benefit.

To Know More, Contact Us

Author Name: Srikanth Rajagopalan

Designation: CEO, Perfios Account Aggregation Services Pvt. Ltd.

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