New Delhi, July 21 -- For years, getting a loan meant hunting for bank statements, scanning PDFs and waiting days for an answer. Increasingly, lenders are replacing that paperwork with your consent to access your financial data.

The shift is being powered by the Account Aggregator (AA) framework, which lets borrowers securely share financial information with lenders without the AA storing it. The payoff is faster decisions-and, in some cases, better loan pricing.

Richer data is also helping AI-driven underwriting models distinguish disciplined borrowers from risky ones. As of December 2025, 64 lenders had onboarded onto the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) Unified Lending Interface, a centralised gateway connecting lenders to AAs and other...