RBI to introduce single lending interface to facilitate small borrowers

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is gearing up for the nationwide launch of a game-changing technology platform aimed at enabling seamless access to credit across all sectors, with a special focus on agriculture and MSME loans, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das announced on Monday.

He was speaking at the inaugural address of the two-day Global Conference on Digital Public Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies in Bengaluru, organized to commemorate RBI’s 90th anniversary. “Continuing this journey of digitization of banking services, last year we launched the pilot of a technology platform that enables frictionless lending. Now, we propose to call it the Unified Lending Interface (ULI),” said Das.

The ULI platform is designed to facilitate the transparent, consensus-based flow of digital information, including land data from various states, from multiple data service providers to lenders.

This significantly reduces the time required for credit assessment, especially to the benefit of small and rural borrowers. With its common and standardized APIs, ULI offers a “plug and play” approach, providing digital access to information from various sources while minimizing the complexity of multiple technical integrations.

“Just as UPI (Unified Payment Interface) has transformed the payment ecosystem, we expect ULI to play a similar role in transforming the lending space in India. The ‘new trinity’ JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhar, Mobile )-UPI-ULI will be a revolutionary step in India’s digital infrastructure journey,” said Das.

He also pointed out that by digitizing access to financial and non-financial customer data, which otherwise remained scattered in various silos, ULI is able to address the significant unmet demand for credit in various sectors, particularly for agricultural borrowers and MSMEs.

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