Pine Labs-Owned Setu Receives In-Principle Licence To Operate As Account Aggragator

Fintech infrastructure startup Setu’s subsidiary Agya Technologies has received an in-principle licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an account aggregator, Nikhil Kumar, cofounder of Setu, said on Twitter.

“In the last ten years India’s financial services landscape has been shaped by the public digital Infrastructure; Aadhaar – brought down the cost of onboarding, UPI – brought down the cost of transactions and now account aggregator will usher a new wave of innovation,” Kumar said.

For the uninitiated, an account aggregator (AA) is a type of RBI regulated entity (with an NBFC-AA licence) that helps an individual securely and digitally access and share information from one financial institution he/she has an account with to any other regulated financial institution in the AA network. However, data cannot be shared without the consent of the individual.

As per Kumar, Setu started its AA journey last year and built the technology stack for financial information users (FIUs) – all the way from having sandbox, easy to integrate application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs), support for certification and providing customer support to take its customers live. 

In the last year, other players such as PhonePe and NSDL E-Governance have also received in-principle approval to operate as AA. 

“The licence enables us to now go deeper and power AA for every single bank, NBFC, and fintech in India,” he added.

Last month, IPO-bound Pine Labs acquired Bengaluru-based Setu to strengthen its offerings in a $70 Mn – 75 Mn deal. Setu is an application programming interface (API) infrastructure provider that offers services across bill payments, savings, credit and payments.

“The objective is if we can bring embedded finance and embedded payments together, this could be a very powerful proposition out from Pine Labs in the marketplace. We are effectively building for an open-banking infrastructure, an open API infrastructure,” PineLabs CEO B Amrish Rau said then.

Pine Labs is eyeing a NASDAQ listing this year. The startup raised $150 Mn in February from Alpha Ventures at a valuation of over $6 Bn.

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