Ashwini Kumar Tewari, MD, State Bank of India has expressed concern over the Account Aggregator mechanism | Photo credit: FRANCIS MASCARENHAS
Tewari, speaking at an event here, said most customers do not read the fine print and often sign up without understanding the details.
What is account aggregation?
Account aggregation is a mechanism through which banks obtain a single consent from customers for financial services products. An Account Aggregator is a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulated entity that acts as a consent-based data intermediary. The Account Aggregator framework was introduced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to enable easy data sharing between financial institutions for faster decision making. There are currently a whopping 225 million users on AA
One-time authorization for all products
Tewari said a single customer consent is used for all financial services products, including loans, wealth management and account opening.
Tewari said the customer’s consent was obtained only once; customers didn’t read the fine print before authorizing and ended up signing up without understanding. “I’m a little concerned about this… No one understands the fine print. And they give one single consent for everything. Is that OK? Probably not,” he said.
Tewari said, “We are in an era where privacy has become very important with laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),” and wondered how “we operate with such a setup in India, where customers may not be understanding.”
The SBI Managing Director said the self-regulatory organizations (SROs) for the fintech sector had not achieved any success in finding the right solution to the problem.
Warns of a ban
Tewari urged the industry to come together and solve the problem itself by building the right safeguards, warning that otherwise the regulatory apparatus could come up with a ban, like in real money gaming.
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Published on December 10, 2025
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