RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra announced the move on October 7, alongside the central bank’s monetary policy decision.
Under the new framework, SEBI-regulated depositories will be facilitated to include information related to bank deposit accounts in the CAS through the Non-Banking Financial Company Account Aggregator (NBFC-AA) framework. This would allow demat account holders to view information relating to their demat holdings and bank deposit accounts in one place through the CAS.
What is a Consolidated Account Statement (CAS)?
A Consolidated Account Statement is already used to give investors a consolidated view of their securities holdings.
SEBI’s framework provides for CAS covering securities assets, including information relating to securities held by an investor across different demat accounts and mutual fund investments. Depositories consolidate the relevant information and issue the statement to investors.
The RBI’s latest move seeks to add bank-deposit information to the financial information that can be viewed alongside an investor’s existing securities holdings.
What will change for your bank deposits?
The key change is that information addition.
This covers deposit information such as savings and fixed deposits within the broader Account Aggregator framework.
For a person who has a demat account, this could eventually mean being able to see their demat holdings and bank deposit information in a single statement, rather than having to refer separately to their securities statement and bank records.
However, the practical implementation and exact format of the expanded CAS will depend on the implementation by the relevant entities.
What about shares, mutual funds and bonds?
Your existing securities information does not disappear or change and CAS already provides a consolidated view of securities assets.
What if you don’t have a demat account?
Customers without demat accounts will still be able to get a consolidated view of their financial information and share it through NBFC Account Aggregators.
This is separate from the CAS mechanism for demat holders. In other words, you do not need to own shares simply to use the broader Account Aggregator framework for consolidating and sharing your financial information.
What are Account Aggregators?
Account Aggregators are RBI-regulated entities that enable customers to securely share their financial information between financial institutions with the customer’s consent.
The RBI has now enabled interoperability among NBFC Account Aggregators.
This means customers will be able to access and share their financial information across different financial information providers through an NBFC-AA of their choice, rather than being restricted by which Account Aggregator is connected to a particular institution.
The Account Aggregator system remains consent-based. Interoperability does not mean that an Account Aggregator can freely access or share someone’s bank information. The customer has to authorise the sharing of the relevant financial information.
When will the new system be implemented?
The RBI said both measures — interoperability among NBFC Account Aggregators and facilitating the inclusion of bank-deposit information in CAS — are expected to be implemented by December 31, 2026.