Account Aggregator Archives

14/10/202118/10/2021

Confidential Clean Rooms in DEPA

We are at the cusp of a data empowerment revolution in India. The DEPA architecture and its first instantiation, the Account Aggregator (AA) framework are empowering individuals and businesses to share their data at low cost and friction, enabling scenarios such as flow-based lending. The Unified Health Interface (UHI) is expected to drive a similar transformation in healthcare.

At the same time, we are acutely aware of the challenges that lurk, none more serious that security and privacy. With the Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN)/AA framework, for example, a data principal can share their data instantly with many lenders, with no technical guarantees that all lenders will use their data only for the purpose of evaluating the current loan application. The upcoming Personal Data Protection Bill, increased regulation and periodic compliance audits can help detect and deter data abuse. But these measures are not only insufficient in the face of advanced, persistent threats from malicious data consumers, they increase operational costs and limit participation.

We are taking a step towards addressing these challenges by introducing a new privacy construct in Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) called Confidential Clean Rooms. Confidential clean rooms are hardware-protected secure computing environments where sensitive data can be processed while limiting the purpose for which it can be used. For example, lenders can host their business rule engines in confidential clean rooms, and prove to an auditor, regulator, or the consent manager that they cannot access the raw financial data, and the only outcome that they can learn is the loan offer. Confidential clean rooms are based on an emerging technology broadly called confidential computing, which is already supported by major hardware manufacturers such as Intel Corp and AMD and by all major cloud providers, and we expect this technology will mature and be commoditized over the next couple of years.

Today we are announcing the launch of a pilot to evaluate the feasibility and value of confidential clean rooms in the context of OCEN. The pilot is open to lenders, technology services providers and independent software vendors to partner with us over the course of the next year.

Please see the following open house session for more details about partnering with us and indicate your interest using the following forms by 31st of October 2021.

Register for Confidential Clean Rooms Pilot: https://bit.ly/CCRPilotGForm

Related Information Below

31/08/202102/09/2021

Account Aggregator Ecosystem Go-Live

iSPIRT Foundation welcomes you to the virtual launch of the industry-wide Account Aggregator (AA) ecosystem on September 2, 2021.

This event announces the major financial institutions that have gone live, and demonstrates the powerful use cases of AA. It will be a major milestone for the AA framework for consented data access and sharing in the financial sector.

Time (IST)	Session	Speaker(s)
4:00-4:10 PM	A Regulatory Framework for Account Aggregators and the Path Ahead	Shri M Rajeshwar Rao, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India
4:10-4:30 PM	The Account Aggregator Leapfrog is Here!	– Presentation by Shri Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, RBI Committee on Deepening Digital Payments (2019) and Volunteer, iSPIRT – Workflow demonstration by Shri Siddharth Shetty
4:30-4:35 PM	The Early Builders on AA	Hear from a cross-section of ‘early mover’ CEOs and leaders of major Banks/NBFCs, Account Aggregators, and Technology Service Providers
4:35-4:45 PM	A Global Perspective on India’s Account Aggregator Model	Shri Siddharth Tiwari, Chief Representative for Asia and the Pacific, Bank for International Settlements
4:50-5:35 PM	Fintech Roundtable: Innovating on AA for Improved Financial Services	Panel discussion moderated by Shri Rajesh Bansal, CEO RBI Innovation Hub. Panellists: Harshvardhan Lunia, Founder, Lendingkart; Sumit Gwalani, Co-Founder, Fi; Shiv Chatterjee, Co-Founder, DMI Finance; Naveen Kukreja, Co-Founder, Paisabazaar; Sucharita Mukherjee, Co-Founder, Kaleidofin, Nithin Kamath, Co-Founder, Zerodha
5:35-5:55 PM	Fireside Chat on the Future of Cross-Sectoral Data Sharing	Moderator: Shri Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog; Panellists: Dr RS Sharma (Chairman, National Health Authority); Shri Ajay Seth, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs and Member, Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC)
5:55-6:00 PM	Designing User Control over Data for India	Hear from current and future Account Aggregators on innovating for control over our personal data
6:00-6:10 PM	Closing Remarks: Building for India	Dr Pramod Varma, Chief Architect, India Stack

To participate, please Register now

15/10/202015/10/2020

Introducing Developer Community for OCEN

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Over the course of four weeks in July and August 2020, iSPIRT conducted a series of Open House Discussions to introduce and familiarise India’s fintech ecosystem with the new Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN).

Background

OCEN is a new paradigm for credit that seeks to provide a ‘common language for lenders and marketplaces to build innovative, financial credit products at scale’.

Announced recently, it is a reimagination of the credit ecosystem, where any service provider that has an interface with users (individual or MSME) can now effectively ‘plug in’ lending capabilities into their current operations through the use of a standard set of APIs, thus taking on a new role as Loan Service Providers (LSPs).

The idea behind OCEN is to standardise the various components of a typical lending value chain so that any marketplace, app or platform that already aggregates users can make use of these APIs to cater to the credit demands of their customers. This eliminates the need to expend time and energy on setting up individual integrations with potential lending partners.

OCEN is trying to solve for one of India’s most devastating roadblocks to financial inclusion i.e. access to formal credit for the individuals and businesses that need it most. The unit economics and archaic models of our existing lending setup have led to an MSME credit gap of $330 bn with only 11% of our small businesses being able to access credit from traditional lenders.

By tapping into the existing customer pools of LSPs and working in tandem with other components of our public digital infrastructure (UPI, Account Aggregators, e-KYC etc), lenders can nullify the costs of discovering and servicing new customers, while also leveraging alternate data to offer more personalised, innovative credit products. OCEN will help to facilitate a methodical shift from balance sheet-based lending to cash-flow based lending that will help to bring more borrowers under the canopy of our formal credit system.

There are numerous ways for participants to contribute across this new OCEN-enabled lending value chain, and indeed it will take the combined efforts of lenders, LSPs, TSPs PSPs, and everyone in between for OCEN to achieve its lofty ambitions.

OCEN Developer Community

Based on the interactions with the ecosystem over the past two months, iSPIRT would like to formally announce the creation of the OCEN Developer Community, whose role is to help build and share knowledge required to make OCEN a success for all participants. The specifications for OCEN can be found here.

The goal of this community would be to:

Help reduce the implementation cycles and turnaround times for OCEN APIs
Transfer learnings and best practices from those who are creating and maintaining the OCEN API specs to all the entities keen to implement and experiment with OCEN (LSPs, FIs, AAs etc)
Seek feedback from the developer ecosystem about what changes and/or improvements to make for future releases
Onboard enthusiasts and ‘super users’ to play a more hands on role in overall API creation and implementation

If you’re interested in contributing to this group and being part of the discussion, please log in to http://ocen.discussion.ispirt.in/. For any other questions on becoming an LSP, Technical Service Provider (TSP) or Lender, drop us an email at [email protected].

In case you are curious about other ongoing initiatives outside of OCEN, there are also communities for the Account Aggregator framework (discourse.sahamati.org.in) and National Health Stack (HealthStack.discussion.ispirt.in) that you are also welcome to join.

We know that an engaged developer community is key to ensuring that this initiative is conceptualised and executed properly. We welcome the participation of our talented developer ecosystem and are looking forward to working alongside you.

Author: Mahesh Govind

A further deep-dive into OCEN has been captured in this piece by Aaryaman Vir and Rahul Sanghi – https://tigerfeathers.substack.com/p/ocen-a-conversation

11/07/202011/07/2020

Sahamati Organizes Historic Account Aggregator Hackathon

The DigiSahamati Foundation, the non-profit Self Regulatory Organization responsible for evangelizing the nascent Account Aggregator (AA) ecosystem, is organizing a hackathon featuring lots of masterclasses for the public to attend and learn from.

As a refresher, an AA is a new kind of legal entity defined in this RBI circular. The basic idea is that the average Indian today generates lots of financial data. Each credit card payment, sale of a mutual fund, repayment of a loan, and filing of an invoice generates some new data about users, be they individuals or businesses.

This data trail is actually very valuable – understanding a person’s financial activity can tell you a lot about that individual’s behaviour, preferences, and profile as a consumer. Today, banks use this data about customers to sell them various kinds of products (insurance, loans, savings products), and they also sell the customer’s data to marketers and advertisers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it happens in a secure way, with the customer’s consent and in such a way that the customer gets some value out of it too.

This is where the AA comes in. In today’s world, the customer doesn’t have any say nor cut of revenue when the bank shares their data with marketers. It is also difficult to extract the valuable financial data outside of a bank’s database to share with a third party provider such as a lender, insurer, or wealth manager. Until now, the only ways customers could get their data out of the bank today is through physical passbooks, downloaded PDF statements, or by giving access to their SMS/emails/netbanking account.

These methods are painful and unsafe, and they don’t help a customer get the best deals. If the customer could easily and cheaply move their data to third parties, then maybe they would get better interest rates and prices, and their existing bank would also have to offer more competitive products and pricing.

Fortunately, the banks and RBI have figured out that in order for India’s financial sector to really grow, individuals and companies need a more safe and efficient way to maximize the value of their ever growing data. This will not only benefit consumers, it will also result in a richer and more innovative banking landscape with a larger customer base. The AA is the entity which helps users give their consent to move data outside their bank account to a third party in a safe and easy manner. The customer gets to choose exactly what data to share, with who, for how long, and under what conditions. This consent is granularly programmable and revocable. Detailed information about this new system can be found on the Sahamati blog.

The AA framework is about to go live in the next months with some of the country’s largest financial institutions including SBI, HDFC, ICICI, IndusInd, Axis, IDFC First, Bajaj Finance, and others. Given this timing, Sahamati decided to organize a hackathon in order to spread awareness of this powerful new infrastructure.

The response so far has been excellent for them. More than 600 hackers were accepted to take part in this four-week long virtual hackathon. During these four weeks, participants in the hackathon will learn about all the different facets of this new technology, from UI/UX to security to product innovations in fields like lending, insurance, personal finance management, and more.

All of these masterclasses, as well as the final presentations by hackathon participants, are open to the public. The list of masterclass presents can be found here.

The hackathon officially kicked off last Saturday. It was inaugurated by Mr. Nandan Nilekani, non-executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Infosys. There were also a number of presentations last week, including a deep dive into the technical architecture of the AA framework and a masterclass on successful use cases for financial data in the EU.

Here is the schedule for this weekend, perhaps some of you reading will be interested in attending some of these masterclasses!

Saturday, 11th July:

4 pm: Security, Cryptography, and Interoperability in the AA World by Sasikumar Ganesan, VP – Platform, Aujas Networks
5 pm: Insurance Technology Opportunities in the AA Landscape by Anand Datta, Nexus Venture Partners

Sunday, 12th July:

3 pm: Account Aggregators and the UI/UX of Consent by Dharmesh BA, Head of Research, D91 Labs & Setu
4 pm: Lending in the Age of Account Aggregators by Manish Bhatia, President – Technology, Lendingkart
5 pm: Using Data Science and Machine Learning with Account Aggregators by Aakash NS, Co-Founder, of Jovian.ml

The entire schedule for the hackathon, along with all public links, can be found here!

We hope some of you attend this event and see the power of this transformational new infrastructure for yourselves!