The three players
Every AA data flow involves three roles. Financial Information Providers (FIPs) are the institutions that hold your data — banks, mutual fund registrars, insurers, pension funds. Financial Information Users (FIUs) are the apps and institutions you want to share that data with — a lender assessing you for a loan, or a personal-finance app like Money Co-Pilot. In between sits the Account Aggregator itself: an RBI-licensed NBFC whose only job is to move your data from FIP to FIU when — and only when — you consent.
Consent is the product
What makes AA different from every data-sharing hack that came before is the consent artefact — a digital, machine-readable record of exactly what you agreed to share. It specifies which accounts, what kind of data, for what purpose, how often it can be fetched, and until when.
You can view every consent you've given and revoke any of them at any time. When a consent expires or is revoked, the data stops flowing. No calls, no forms, no 'please allow 30 working days'.
The AA can't read your data
Here's the design detail most people miss: Account Aggregators are data-blind. The data that moves through them is encrypted end to end — the AA transports it but cannot read or store it. Your bank encrypts the data for the receiving app specifically; the courier never sees inside the envelope.
Compare that with screen-scraping, where you hand an app your actual net-banking credentials and hope for the best. With AA, your passwords never leave your bank. You authenticate directly with your institution through its official channel.
Where the ecosystem stands in 2026
The framework went live in September 2021 with a handful of banks and has since grown to cover hundreds of institutions — major banks, brokers, insurers, and pension providers. In 2026, the RBI recognised Sahamati — the industry alliance that has shepherded the ecosystem since the beginning — as the official self-regulatory organisation for Account Aggregators, a sign of how central AA has become to India's financial infrastructure.
How Money Co-Pilot uses AA
Money Co-Pilot connects to your accounts exclusively through the Account Aggregator framework. That means read-only access, always: we can see the data you consent to share — balances, transactions, holdings — and we can never move, invest or withdraw anything. You choose what to connect, you see every consent, and you can revoke us at any time. That's not a policy we wrote; it's how the rails are built.
This article is for general information only and describes the Account Aggregator ecosystem as of July 2026.