PhonePe to wind down account aggregator business, surrender NBFC-AA licence

Walmart-owned PhonePe on Friday announced it was exiting from account aggregator (AA) business and surrendering NBFC-AA licence to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) -- about two years after securing it.

 

Account aggregators are non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) that deliver a user’s financial data from financial information providers (FIPs) to financial information users (FIUs).

 

India’s largest fintech firm attributed its decision to quit the AA business to its inability to on-board as many FIPs as it “would have liked” due to its competing nature of priorities.

 

“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 about our decision, and help them as per regulatory guidelines,” the company said in a statement.

 

While the company is exiting the AA business, it said it would partner with other AAs in the market.

 

It received the AA licence in 2023.

 

“This was a departure from our usual strategy of building only end consumer (B2C) products,” the company said.

 

At present, there are 16 RBI-registered NBFC-AAs.

 

As of December 2024, over 119 million customer accounts were linked to the FIP system. This has more than tripled from 38.96 million in December 2023, according to data from Sahamati, an industry alliance of the AA ecosystem.

 

During the same period, over 143 million consent requests were fulfilled in December 2024 by FIPs, over three times increase from 41.26 million in December 2023.