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 The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will on August 17 launch a pilot project for a public tech platform, which will enable delivery of frictionless credit by facilitating seamless flow of required digital information to lenders. 

The formation of the platform had been announced by RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das on August 10 during the monetary policy review.

The public tech platform for frictionless credit is being developed by the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), a wholly-owned subsidiary of RBI.

Amid rapid digitalisation, banks and other financial institutions have begun using digital public infrastructure.

However, the data needed for digital credit delivery is available with different entities like Central and state governments, account aggregators, banks, credit information companies, digital identity authorities, etc. 

Also, it is in separate systems, thus creating hindrance in frictionless and timely delivery of rule-based lending.

The public tech platform will enable delivery of frictionless credit by facilitating seamless flow of required digital information to the lenders. 

The end-to-end digital platform will have an open architecture, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and standards, to which all financial sector players can connect seamlessly in a ‘plug and play’ model.

The platform is intended to be rolled out as a pilot project in a calibrated fashion, both in terms of access to information providers and use cases. 

It shall bring about efficiency in the lending process in terms of reduction of costs, quicker disbursement and scalability, an official statement issued by the RBI said.

During the pilot, the platform shall focus on products such as Kisan Credit Card loans up to Rs 1.6 lakh per borrower, dairy loans, MSME loans (without collateral), personal loans and home loans through participating banks. 

The platform shall enable linkage with services such as Aadhaar e-KYC, land records from onboarded state governments (Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra), satellite data, PAN validation, transliteration, Aadhaar e-signing, and account aggregation by account aggregators (AAs), among others.

Based on the learnings, the scope and coverage would be expanded to include more products, information providers and lenders during the pilot, the RBI said.