You last invested in several stocks and mutual funds through several brokers and MF distributors quite some time ago. But you are unclear. One day you realize that you need to start treating financial planning seriously. You take the help of a financial professional to assist you in sorting things out.

Getting additional information about you and your previous transactions is the first thing your financial advisor would advise you to do. They are interested in your actions and investments. So, feeling pleased with your work, you distribute the excel document you made.

But after carefully examining the spreadsheet, they sigh in disappointment. Nothing describes your transaction history or investing approach. They assert that the data is inconsistent. They now want more details about you, including your risk profile. They must verify the information about your investments. Your credentials cannot be shared. You then go out to collect all the data once more.

Unfortunately, all of your data isn’t gathered in one place. It is scattered throughout several websites, including aggregators for mutual funds and your bank. Your insurance provider, external and mutual fund firms, and others may have access to information about your other investments. In essence, you can’t access your data from a single touchpoint because that would need manual assembly.

What if a different approach didn’t involve any of these hassles? Account Aggregators will carry out that same task. On August 19, the capital markets regulatory body SEBI joined the account aggregator framework. Due to the move, clients will be allowed to speak with financial service providers about their stock and mutual fund holdings.

Account Aggregator, sometimes abbreviated as “AA,” is a non-banking finance corporation (NBFC) under the RBI’s jurisdiction, making it easier to gather financial data with the customer’s permission. They’ll link “Financial Information Users” (FIU), like financial advisers, brokerage firms, etc., to “Financial Information Providers” (FIP), like asset management firms or banks.

Let us simplify this.

The FIU or financial adviser will first ask the AA to disclose the relevant investment information, including the most recent, real-time data.