PhonePe surrenders its account aggregator license after failing to onboard enough partners

India's largest fintech, a Walmart-group payments company serving consumers and merchants.

That its own AA platform could accelerate India's nascent account aggregator ecosystem — a departure from PhonePe's usual build-only-B2C strategy.

By 2022, India's account aggregator (AA) ecosystem was still nascent and early adoption numbers were low. In June 2023 PhonePe took its own NBFC-AA license — as the company put it, a departure from its usual strategy of building only end-consumer (B2C) products — to build its own AA platform and help accelerate the ecosystem's growth.

The AA platform let users share their financial information, with consent, with banks and financial institutions for services like loans and credit cards. Within two years PhonePe registered nearly 5 crore Indians on it. But with competing priorities, the company could not onboard as many financial information providers (FIPs) — the institutions whose data powers the platform — as it would have liked, leaving the supply side short of expectation.

In February 2025 PhonePe announced it had exited the account aggregation business: it decided to surrender the NBFC-AA license to the RBI and initiated the wind-down of AA operations. It said it would instead partner with other account aggregators in the market to support financial inclusion, and would reach out to its AA users to help them per regulatory guidelines.

PhonePe could not sign enough financial information providers (FIPs) to make the platform work as it expected — the marketplace's supply side never filled.

Competing priorities inside the company kept the AA business from getting the partner-building effort it needed.

With 50 million registered users but too few FIPs, the platform could not deliver the loan, credit card and other financial services it was licensed for.

Exiting let PhonePe keep serving the use case without running the infrastructure: it will partner with other account aggregators instead.

The 2023 entry had itself been framed as an experiment outside PhonePe's B2C comfort zone — accelerating an ecosystem, not owning a consumer product.

A license and a large user base do not make a marketplace: PhonePe had 50 million registered users but too few data-providing institutions, so it exited and went back to partnering with others.

As of February 7, 2025, PhonePe had begun winding down AA operations, initiated surrender of the NBFC-AA license to the RBI, and said it would reach out to its AA user base shortly to inform them of the decision and help them as per regulatory guidelines. It said it would partner with other account aggregators in the market going forward.