RBI’s October 2026 policy: Account Aggregator interoperability and bank deposits in your CAS

What did RBI announce on 7 October 2026?

The Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies released with the October 2026 monetary policy contained only two measures. The first, under “Regulation”, was titled “Measures to Enhance the Customer Convenience through the Account Aggregator Framework”:

• Interoperability among NBFC-AAs. RBI said it “has been decided to implement interoperability among NBFC-Account Aggregators”, enabling customers to access and share their financial information, across different financial information providers, “through any NBFC-AA of their choice”.
• Bank deposits in the CAS. SEBI-regulated depositories are being facilitated to include bank deposit account information in their Consolidated Account Statement through NBFC-AAs, so demat account holders can see their demat holdings and bank deposits in one place.
• Non-demat customers can continue to get a consolidated view of their financial information and share it through AAs.
• Timeline: both measures are expected to be implemented by 31 December 2026.

The second measure set up a Technical Consultative Committee for Financial Markets, whose composition and terms of reference will be notified separately. In his statement, the Governor summarised the AA change as “enabling aggregation of financial information through all account aggregators from one account aggregator”.

Why does interoperability matter?

Today a customer links accounts to a particular AA, and a lender or wealth manager (the FIU) has to work with an AA that can reach the customer’s banks and other FIPs. Not every AA is necessarily connected to every FIP, so a customer may end up on more than one AA, and an FIU may need integrations with several. Interoperability is meant to let one AA reach information at FIPs connected through any other AA.

RBI did not publish the technical design in the statement: who routes requests between AAs, how consent artefacts travel across them, and how fees are shared are still to be set out. Expect those details in a circular or in standards from the ecosystem’s self-regulatory organisation.

How big is the AA network it applies to?

Sahamati’s dashboard counted 352.19 million accounts linked and 595.11 million consents fulfilled, cumulatively, by 30 September 2026, with 28.85 million consents fulfilled in September alone. RBI recognised Sahamati Foundation as the self-regulatory organisation for the AA ecosystem on 5 June 2026, and its Annual Report 2025-26 listed “publication of standards to enhance customer protection and user experience within the account aggregator framework” on the FinTech Department’s agenda for 2026-27. For how the framework works, see our Account Aggregator explainer.

What else happened in payments and fintech, August–October 2026?

The AA decision was the clearest payments-and-fintech policy step of the quarter. RBI’s August 2026 developmental statement dealt with co-operative bank licensing, concentration risk and loan interest-rate rules. Other dated developments we could verify on rbi.org.in:

Paytm Payments Bank’s exclusion closes a long chapter: RBI cancelled its banking licence on 24 April 2026, and the Delhi High Court ordered it wound up by orders of 8 and 22 July 2026, RBI said in a press release of 28 July 2026. The UFF became the second fintech SRO after the FinTech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE), recognised in August 2024, per RBI’s 10 September release.

The 10 October foreign-exchange circulars are about markets rather than payments, but exporters who hedge will notice them: RBI barred rebooking of cancelled INR derivative contracts, cut the threshold for hedging without proving the underlying exposure from USD 100 million to USD 5 million, and required AD banks to keep a cash Foreign Exchange Risk Reserve of 20% of notional with RBI on certain contracts above USD 2 million, according to its press release. Check the circulars’ operative text with your bank.

What does it mean for customers and businesses?

For customers, the promise is choice: pick one AA app and use it to reach all your accounts, instead of choosing an AA by which banks it happens to support. For investors, a single CAS from the depository could show demat holdings and bank deposits together. For lenders, wealth managers and other FIUs, it should mean fewer AA integrations to build and maintain to reach the same set of customers. Consent stays the core of it: data still moves only on a consent the customer has approved and can revoke.

What happens next?

• Implementation details for AA interoperability and for deposits in the CAS, ahead of the 31 December 2026 target.
• Standards from Sahamati as the AA SRO, which RBI’s agenda links to customer protection and user experience.
• Notification of the Technical Consultative Committee for Financial Markets.