ACCOUNT AGGREGATOR – THE NEXT BIG THING IN BANKING TECHNOLOGY?

Account Aggregator will change how consumers interact with their banks and financial institutions. It will light up the way consumers can share and control their financial data. It’ll be one of the most disruptive technologies in financial services. The account aggregators in india can be used by any Indian bank, with more banks joining the platform every day. Consumers need access to their financial data and make more informed financial decisions. This is where the Account Aggregator comes in. The Account Aggregator allows a consumer to securely access and manage all their financial accounts (including savings accounts, loans, insurance, and investment accounts) from one single electronic record. For example, an Account Aggregator connected to a consumer’s bank can tell that consumer’s bank if their Loan account has been paid off on time when it was paid off, the amount paid off, and if it was paid off by direct debit or card payment. The information shared by the consumer’s bank with the Account Aggregator could be used by a wealth management company, for example, to get a better picture of a consumer’s financial health and set up a Financial Planning and Investment product for them. 

  How will the AA network improve a person’s financial life? 

It collects your transactions, reconciles and posts transactions to your bank account on a regular basis. This process can be automated to reduce the time it takes to reconcile your account each month. The goal of this network is to ensure you are always aware of any changes that occur to your accounts and have immediate access to all relevant information. For example, suppose you forget about upcoming bill payments and forget to pay them. In that case, the Account Aggregator network will send a notification to your phone or email alerting you that something isn’t correct in your accounts. While not every bank or credit card provides this type of technology, the ones make it easier for you to stay on top of your finances and prevent unnecessary expenses from piling up. 

What are the various applications of AAs?

1. A loan applicant must pass through a confusing manual process of collecting essential documents, having them notarized, and supplying them to a bank or non-bank financial institution to gain a loan. Because of the many touchpoints, this data is at risk of getting incomplete, tampered with, or even falsified. The AA enables consumers and lenders to access and share data through a single click on the AA framework. Lenders may collect data directly from different institutions and deliver it to the consumer using an AA once the consumer consents.
2. According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), by 2025, the total financial wealth of Indians will grow annually to $5 trillion. There is a huge opportunity in this underdeveloped sector. Institutional investment will increase to keep up with the growing demand for wealth managers. However, across the country, wealth managers rely on the physical delivery of critical financial documents from clients. This procedure is time-consuming and has several problems. By utilizing AA, clients can give recurring consent to let their AA provide access to their financial details. This will dramatically change the wealth management industry, as clients will save time and to-and-fros.
3. Individual loan applications are getting more complicated to process, and account aggregators are bridging this gap. In addition to having a credit history being critical to obtaining credit, many other factors determine credit accessibility. New borrowers without credit history may have difficulty obtaining reasonably priced and straightforward loans from banks and NBFCs. Additionally, due to their unpredictable income, self-employed workers or small business proprietors with volatile or seasonal revenues have fewer and more costly financing options. As well as being asked to provide collateral to obtain a credit facility, lenders frequently demand collateral to guarantee their loans. Account aggregators, as a minimum, share trustworthy and top-quality information on a customer’s bank behaviour, cash flow, and systemic payment behaviour.
4. The AA Framework has the potential to disrupt customer journeys by allowing real-time data-driven decision-making. It may disrupt the data landscape by disrupting consumer journeys, where information asymmetry may give firms a competitive advantage. Banks can offer improved offers to their existing clients, thanks to their access to consumer financial data. In some ways, information asymmetry limits innovation and competition in the fintech industry. Because AA data is system-generated and has real-time access, it can yield substantial cost reductions for data-driven innovation. Digital lending has already seen development. While the AA ecosystem is still in its infancy, the regulator and government’s push has led to a rapid takeoff, with early adopters in fintech.

Mode of working of AAs

Introduction to aggregation of financial accounts is very important as the Account Aggregator network is the infrastructure behind all of your financial accounts. The Account Aggregator (AA) handles the customers’ data to allow businesses to share information. Customers provide their data to Financial Information Providers (FIPs), usually banks, asset management firms, insurance firms, and other financial institutions. The Account Aggregator (AA) serves as a consent manager for financial information, maintaining the consent records and functioning as a data-sharing enabling platform. After receiving the consent requests from the FIPs, the FIUs encrypt the consent data and send it to the customers. The FIU decrypts this information for agreed-upon applications such as cash flow-based lending, credit risk monitoring, personalized wealth management, and more. Customer consent controls whether they know the purpose, the amount of time the data is accessible, and the data’s vintage. They easily share their one or six-month bank statement data with the FIU as a result of this. Furthermore, data collection is less difficult, and data hijacking and sharing are simpler due to this. Users may also revoke their consent by directly contacting the AA. 

Summary

Anumati is a new way of aggregating and analyzing customer data in real time. Anumati is powered by Machine Learning and AI technologies to provide actionable insights to businesses. The key value proposition of Anumati is that it enables businesses to gain real-time insight into their customers’ journeys. The platform allows businesses to see what customers do at every stage of their journey, from the point of first contact through purchase and repeat usage. It also provides insights into customer behaviour at different stages of the customer cycle, such as first visit, trial, early repeat usage and long-term retention. This helps businesses make informed decisions about marketing strategies, pricing and product offerings.