 Hello everyone, my name is Malavika Raghavan and my colleague Anubhuti Singh and I are delighted to have our paper accepted at the 2020 Centre Banks of the Future Conference. We are researchers in India working with the Future of Finance initiative at Tvara Research where we address new challenges for regulation given the waves of digital innovation currently sweeping financial services. One of the big bets that Indian policy makers have made in the last few decades is to invest in vast public digital infrastructures to enable financial services in India. In addition to investing in traditional areas like payment systems and co-banking services, they have also built a vision for a large scale consumer data aggregation and sharing in the financial sector. And our paper focuses on one novel piece of this public digital infrastructure vision for consumer data sharing called account aggregators by our central bank, the Reserve Bank of India or RBI. In our paper titled the regulation of information flows as central bank functions, implications from the treatment of account aggregators by the Reserve Bank of India, we tried to pass the RBI's regulatory approach to this new class of financial data intermediaries and especially the decision to license them as non-bank financial providers. At a more fundamental level, our paper asks this question, should central banks regulate and enable the flow of personal information? In the next few minutes, my colleague Anubhuti and I will tell you a bit about why this question is important, what account aggregators are and the issues from the regulation of data intermediaries that arise when financial authorities get involved, not just in India but also from open banking regimes globally. We think this question is important because the growth in consumer data aggregation and sharing services in finance is a trend that's been seen around the world. Energy service providers like Plaid and Yodly have been providing these services for years but using their own platforms and our APIs. The Indian approach, therefore, in this context is quite unique and different because here the RBI has taken a leadership role not only in developing a new regulatory form for these financial data intermediaries but also mandating a specific type of technical design with requirements for APIs and so on that need to apply to the system and every account aggregator that is built. So what are account aggregators? Essentially, they are entities that will collect and share consumer's financial information securely from the entity that holds the consumer data and has a relationship with them to entities that might request this information and along the way collect the consumer's consent. Interestingly, our regulations require that the data flows must be encrypted and that the account aggregators themselves must be data blind and have no connection with any financial transaction that follows as a consequence of data sharing. More interestingly, the RBI also made a regulatory choice in the regulations creating these account aggregators to license them, as I mentioned, as NBFCs on non-bank financial companies in the Indian regulatory parlance. This raises an important question for us. What are the consequences of a central bank regulating data intermediaries as non-bank financial institutions? My colleague, Anuputi, will hopefully outline some of the concerns that this question triggered for us as well as how we attacked it in our paper for this conference. Hello, I'm Anuputi Singh, co-author of this paper and I will go over Malika's question about the consequences of a central bank regulating data intermediaries as a non-bank financial institution. As Malika mentioned, the RBI regulates account aggregators as a non-bank financial company or NBFCs. Traditionally, while NBFCs are not banks, they play an important role in the delivery of credit to harder to serve segments that traditional banks have not been able to reach. Previously, categories of NBFC license had only been granted for core investment activity and credits. The NBFC AA license appears to be the only NBFC license category that exists to facilitate information flow rather than any direct financial activity. Comparing this approach to open banking approaches in the Bahrain and the European Union reveals some differences. For instance, open banking enables data sharing mainly geared at providing consumers with a consolidated view of their financial information to enable payments rather than wider data sharing. A new class of licenses for such activities were rooted in the payment regulatory regime rather than the banking regime. Interestingly, when account aggregators were first mentioned by the Indian Central Bank in 2015, they were conceived to be open banking style account information service providers. By 2016, when the final regulations for account aggregators were released, this vision had morphed into one which foresaw a system of data blind intermediaries. The shift in the account aggregators modeled no longer aligns with those of global open banking approaches. What are the implications of account aggregators being regulated as non-bank financial companies? Does this signal a new direction? An intent by the Indian Central Bank to regulate all information flows in the financial sector, which would have implications beyond finance for all of the data economy? This has deeper implications for understanding what the extent of core central banking functions will be for central banks of the future. For our analysis of these questions, do read our paper. We look forward to your feedback and interacting with you for the central banks of the future conference in November 2020. Thank you.