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Fintech startup Setu has been working with potential partners in the Account Aggregator (AA) landscape to build a developer experience for the sandbox. With Setu’s AA sandbox, lenders could build a flow for MSMEs to apply for working capital loans using their bank account statements. 

“Our financial data is a powerful asset that can unlock many new applications. For example, MSMEs can use their cash-flow data to avail working capital loans from lenders. However, opening up this financial data creates new risks around security and privacy. For safe and effective usage of financial data, we believe that users should have full control over who has access to their data and how they use it,” said Nikhil Kumar, Co-founder, Setu.

He explained that consent-based access to financial data is a new and compelling opportunity for fintech developers to build new features and apps for their users. It is to enable these developers that Setu launched a sandbox environment for account aggregator app development. It provides an amazing developer experience around the account aggregator API spec to enable fast and smooth integrations.

The team added that with early usage feedback, Setu has been able to build new value-add features to customise UI and batch APIs on top of the base account aggregator API specifications. The features will be available to all developers who are building on top of the Setu Sandbox.

It has been built to empower all developers to get started with account aggregator app development. The sandbox supports customisable mock data sources that can be used to build a diverse set of data models for credit underwriting, loan account monitoring, and personal finance management. 

AAs are a regulated framework setup by the RBI to facilitate secure movement of data between entities that hold financial data (banks and other financial institutions) and those who wish to use this data for providing financial service. This is done with clear consent of the individual to whom the data belongs to.

They enable users to connect their data providers (e.g., banks that hold your account statements) and with data consumers (e.g., lenders that consume bank statements) and have full control over how data is shared. Account aggregators are regulated entities that facilitate consented data sharing under the DEPA.