India To Expand Digital Public Infrastructure To 50 Countries, Says Nandan Nilekani

India is planning to take digital public infrastructure to 50 countries in the next five years, said Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys.

“We have a plan to take DPI to 50 countries in the next five years. Currently, we have 20 countries implementing DPIs,” Nilekani said at Sahamati SamvAAd 2024.

He said that digital public infrastructure is booming and companies based on DPIs are worth over $100 billion in terms of market capitalisation.

On the rise in digitisation, he said that the account aggregator framework actually helps consumers take advantage of their footprint and that it is at a “taking off point.”

While several challenges need to be fixed in the banking system, Nilekani believes that account aggregators will take off, but it may take some years, equating it to the introduction of Aadhar cards and the Unified Payments Interface that sparked off the digital payments revolution in the country.

 In a gist, an account aggregator is a single point data source for all financial information of a customer that has been sourced from regulated financial service providers. Everything from your bank deposits to investments in mutual funds and pension funds or equity investments will be available in one place.

Account aggregators will source their information from banks, mutual funds, and insurance companies, and their users could be those providing flow-based credit, robo-advisors, personal finance, or wealth managers.

This model is an example of all financial regulators, including the Reserve Bank of India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, and the Pension and Fund Regulatory and Development Authority, joining forces.

The key here is that a customer has to explicitly consent to share the data, though the model is built to protect data and the privacy of the customer. The decision on how much to share and when to share lies with the customer.

So far this year, DigiSahamati Foundation’s account aggregator framework crossed 100 million and it expects 80-90 million people using account aggregator in India, 8% of adult population.

The current usage of account aggregator framework is expected to achieve 25-30% penetration by this financial year.