We hope frictionless credit scale up to digital infrastructure: P Vasudevan

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI's) Executive Director, P Vasudevan, hopes that frictionless credit scales up to become the next digital public infrastructure.

P Vasudevan, Executive Director, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), was speaking on the first day of Bharat Fintech Fest 2024. "I don't want to talk much about the platform (frictionless credit). What the platform is and what the platform can do. We are hoping that this platform can scale up to be another digital public infrastructure."

In August 2023, RBI announced the launch of a pilot project in the form of "Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit" which aimed at improving access to credit. The move was intended to provide digital information to lenders to expedite access to credit.

"People always dream about offering frictionless services. We are also here to provide some services by way of say (Application Programming Interface) APIs that can connect multiple data sources, by way of having lenders over banks, non-banks, and other sites. They can bring a customer on board, they can come to the platform, get the data sources, could be multiple, maybe land records, like various things. And they can actually get a seamless input about the customer from the data sources, which can be useful in their bidding decisions.

In the future, he noted that the central bank aims to include both banks and non-banks gradually into the platform for their loan journey.

"Going forward, we do expect that every loan journey, the personal segment could be part of this frictionless credit platform and also that we need to be there, one on one by the banks, non-banks can also be operated if it goes on the platform," Vasudevan added.