Specifically, Sahamati initiated an Open House Discussion concerning various self-governing mechanisms to promote the fair use of Account Aggregation (AA). Sahamati (DigiSahamati Foundation) is a member-driven industry alliance that was created to promote and strengthen India’s Account Aggregator ecosystem. The not-for-profit private limited company aims to set and achieve new goals for India’s Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture and the Account Aggregator network.
As the AA ecosystem grows, Sahamati brought up a series of guardrails designed to protect against unreasonable data pulls and potential breaches, particularly as newer types of FIU licenses and newer use cases for data fetches are expected to proliferate. Some of the most important topics that were covered during the discussion were transparency, defining guidelines for fair usage of AA, as well as corrections that would be implemented in case of deviations.
According to Sahamati, Account Aggregators leverage technology to assist users in a simple and secure exchange of their data between financial institutions such as banks, insurance agencies or mutual fund companies. However, the information in question cannot be shared without the user’s consent. With AA, users can leverage their own financial data to access a selection of financial services for both personal and business needs.
Sahamati wants to use AA in a manner that complies with generally accepted principles of data privacy. This means that the company is expected to abide by certain limitations. Fair use of AA covers three main principles, namely Purpose Limitation, Collection Limitation, and Storage Limitation.
Purpose Limitation mandates that consent has to be for a purpose the FIU’s charter legitimises and that consent has to be for a purpose that is known to the individual at the time of data collection. Under Collection Limitation, the company is only allowed to collect ‘minimum necessary’ data that is proportionate to the purpose. Storage Limitation ensures that data is not processed longer than is necessary for the purpose.
According to the new transparency initiative launched by Sahamati, each FIU is expected to make the consent parameters transparent to customers and the community. The Sahamati website was suggested to host and showcase a quarterly disclosure of consent templates used by each FIU. These disclosures would become available to other AA community members, policymakers, and regulators.
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