Signals You Can Lend On: The Open Finance Shift
India’s credit system hides an uncomfortable truth. About 37 percent of adults are invisible to credit bureaus. For them, the absence of a file does not mean they are unworthy borrowers, only that their financial lives have not been captured in traditional formats.
Yet in lending, silence often reads as risk. To widen access, lenders need signals that tell richer stories than what bureau scores can show. That is where the shift toward signal-driven retail credit begins.
Turning Retail Credit into a Signal-Driven Story
Credit scores do not calculate a person’s probability of default. Instead, they assign individuals to pools expected to behave in certain ways. The profits from reliable customers cover the costs of riskier ones, and the cycle sustains itself.
Thin-file and new-to-credit customers break this model because their absence of history denies lenders any basis for grouping. Reluctance to lend is not rooted in distrust but in the lack of information to interpret intent.
Signals outside bureau reports are now bridging this gap. Employment records, insurance policies, fixed deposits, utility payments, expense behaviour, and even social profiles reveal financial discipline and repayment patterns.
Consent-driven frameworks such as the Account Aggregator allow these fragments to move securely, creating complete profiles that lenders can trust. By drawing on these signals, the funnel of potential borrowers grows wider.
AA Emerges as India’s Open Finance Backbone
The ability to harness these signals depends on a backbone strong enough to carry them. The Account Aggregator framework has become that backbone. It channels verified data directly from Financial Information Providers through encrypted, consent-based flows.
Borrowers no longer need to submit several documents and lenders no longer struggle with inconsistent formats. The process has become quicker, cleaner, and more reliable. The scale of participation reflects this transformation.
More than 112 million users are already on the AA framework, with 2.2 billion financial accounts enabled for secure sharing. With this level of integration, AA is not just another layer of digital finance; it stands alongside UPI, Aadhaar, and DigiLocker as a pillar of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, embedding inclusivity into the system’s design.
Scale Speaks Louder: AA Traction Marks a Real Turning Point
Moreover, momentum is measured not only in frameworks but in usage. Monthly consent requests through AA are rising by 8 to 10 percent, showing growing trust across borrowers and lenders. More than 780 financial institutions are now live on the system.
The results are visible in hard numbers. With Sahamati setting a target of 5 billion annual transactions by 2027, scale has become the loudest signal of all: AA is no longer an experiment but a turning point in how India accesses and applies financial data.
Bridging Today’s Gaps to Shape Tomorrow’s AA Future
However, growth has not erased the frictions that remain. Traditional banks and NBFCs often face hurdles while integrating AA with legacy systems, which leads to extended development cycles and lower-than-expected success rates in fetching data.
Additionally, digital-first lenders, though more agile, encounter borrower drop-offs during the bank verification step, which lowers consent conversion and raises acquisition costs. Many Financial Information Providers still lack standardised APIs, delaying the creation of full borrower profiles for loans or financial advice.
These gaps do not call for abandoning progress but for refinement. Smarter routing, improved data handling, and simplified consent flows can raise efficiency and adoption. The narrowing gap between potential and practice shows a system in motion.
By closing these operational gaps, the Account Aggregator ecosystem can become the trusted channel through which millions of Indians step into secure and signal-driven credit access.