Aujas Cybersecurity, one of the leading enterprise security service providers announces a launch of “Saksham” which enables organizations to quickly and reliably test their API implementation for compliance, security, and readiness to join the Account Aggregator ecosystem. Saksham is a self-service based automatic certification approach that ensures the APIs used by each organizational entity are as per the schema, interoperability, and security specifications of Reserve Bank Information Technology Private Limited (ReBIT). Sahamati, a collective of the Account Aggregator Ecosystem has impanelled Aujas Cybersecurity to conduct mandatory certification audits for participating organizations of the AA ecosystem.
Managing user data in a secure, economical manner has been a challenge across India. This challenge is due to data in silos across banks, financial and healthcare institutions, telcos, to name a few. There was no framework to collect and securely share this data with user permissions. Aggregating data from far off locations is expensive and can lead to data leaks and privacy breaches. There emerged a national need to effectively manage the fragmented and unsafe data through a secure framework.
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In 2016, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) addressed this issue by approving a new class of NBFCs to function as Account Aggregators (AAs), whose key responsibility is data transfer with explicit user consent. Named Sahamati, this ecosystem helps businesses and individuals collate and share data digitally, ensuring their integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Account Aggregators cannot access, store, or sell user data. End to end protection of data confirms there is a secure data flow between AA entities.
To become a part of the Account Aggregator ecosystem, participant organizations need to comply with RBI guidelines for API & functional flow. The organizations include Financial Information Provider (FIP) (Eg. Banks, Mutual Fund investment, Insurance portfolio, etc.) and Financial Information User (FIU) (Eg. Lending firms, wealth managers, personal finance