PhonePe Exits Account Aggregator Business, Joins Forces with Other AAs for Growth

As one of India’s largest fintechs, PhonePe Group has always tried to build products with a deep focus on solving for financial inclusion for all Indians, which is critical for the country to realize its ambition of becoming a developed economy by 2047.

We strongly believe that growing the Account Aggregator (AA) ecosystem is very important to addressing financial inclusion properly. By 2022, the AA ecosystem was still very nascent and early adoption numbers were still low. So in June 2023 we got our own AA license in a bid to build our own Account Aggregator platform and help accelerate the AA ecosystem’s growth. This was a departure from our usual strategy of building only end consumer (B2C) products.

We feel proud that we have managed to register nearly 5 crore Indians onto our AA platform in less than two years. However, due to competing priorities, we have not been able to onboard as many financial information providers (FIPs) to our platform as we would have liked. The good news is that the AA ecosystem itself is flourishing today, and many of the other players are growing exponentially. Therefore PhonePe Group has decided to exit the Account Aggregator business, and instead we will partner with other AAs in the market.

Accordingly, we have decided to surrender our NBFC-AA licence to the RBI, and initiated the wind down of our AA operations. We will be reaching out to our AA user base shortly to inform them of our decision, and help them as per regulatory guidelines.