The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has revealed plans to launch a pioneering Public Tech Platform for frictionless credit, marking a significant stride towards seamless lending. The announcement was made within the framework of the Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies on August 10, 2023.
The Platform is being developed by Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), a wholly owned subsidiary of RBI. The pilot of the platform shall commence on August 17, 2023. The public tech platform would enable delivery of frictionless credit by facilitating seamless flow of required digital information to lenders. The end-to-end digital platform will have an open architecture, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and standards, to which all financial sector players can connect seamlessly in a ‘plug and play’ model. The platform is intended to be rolled out as a pilot project in a calibrated fashion, both in terms of access to information providers and use cases. It shall bring about efficiency in the lending process in terms of reduction of costs, quicker disbursement, and scalability.
During the pilot, the platform shall focus on products such as kisan credit card loans up to Rs 1.6 lakh per borrower, dairy loans, MSME loans (without collateral), personal loans and home loans through participating banks. The platform shall enable linkage with services such as Aadhaar e-KYC, land records from onboarded State Governments (Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra), Satellite data, PAN Validation, Transliteration, Aadhaar e-signing, account aggregation by Account Aggregators (AAs), milk pouring data from select dairy co-operatives, house/property search data etc. Based on the learnings, the scope and coverage would be expanded to include more products, information providers and lenders during the pilot.
