Key Highlights
- Retired Supreme Court Justice B.N. Srikrishna appointed chairman of the advisory board governing Equal and its fintech affiliate OneMoney.
- The board assembles former RBI deputy governors, a UIDAI veteran, a former IT ministry secretary and senior fintech leaders.
- Its mandate covers compliance with the draft Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, ethical data handling and secure, consent‑based technology design.
- Equal, founded in 2022, links more than 50 identity sources and 4,000+ APIs; OneMoney, an RBI‑licensed account aggregator, was invested in by Equal in August 2024.
- Together the platforms process roughly 75 million transactions each month for over 250 corporate clients.
Detailed Insights
Justice B.N. Srikrishna, a pre‑eminent scholar of privacy law who steered the 2018 committee that drafted India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, will chair the newly constituted advisory board for Equal, an identity‑verification and data‑exchange service, and its strategic partner OneMoney, an RBI‑certified account aggregator. The board’s composition underscores a blend of regulatory, economic and technological expertise: former RBI deputy governors Jagdish Capoor, Rakesh Mohan and Anand Sinha; J. Satyanarayana, the architect of the UIDAI framework; Ajay Prakash Sawhney, who spearheaded UPI and DigiLocker; P.H. Ravikumar, a pioneer in commodity‑exchange platforms; Anitha Ramachandran, an HR governance specialist; and Sunil Kulkarni, a veteran of digital banking solutions.
The council’s chief responsibilities will be to ensure that Equal’s identity‑authentication infrastructure and OneMoney’s consent‑driven financial data‑sharing mechanisms remain fully compliant with the evolving DPDP draft rules, to embed ethical data‑usage norms, and to devise robust governance models that mitigate cyber‑risk. In addition, the board will champion the development of innovative, privacy‑by‑design technologies that can scale across India’s burgeoning digital economy.
Founded by Keshav Reddy and Rajeev Ranjan, Equal aggregates more than fifty government and private identity databases, exposing over 4,000 APIs to corporate customers such as WeWork, L&T, TVS, Aragen and Hetero. The August 2024 strategic investment in OneMoney expanded Equal’s service proposition to include account‑aggregation capabilities, enabling a seamless, user‑consented flow of banking data. The combined ecosystem now facilitates in excess of 75 million monthly transactions and serves a diversified client base exceeding 250 enterprises.
Key Concepts
- Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act: A draft legislation aimed at safeguarding personal information through consent, purpose limitation, and data‑localisation requirements.
- Account Aggregator (AA): An RBI‑licensed intermediary that consolidates a consumer’s financial data from multiple banks and financial institutions, delivering it to third‑party service providers only with explicit user consent.
- Consent‑Driven Data Sharing: A paradigm where individuals must actively approve each instance of data exchange, ensuring transparency and accountability.
- Privacy‑by‑Design: System‑engineering principle that embeds data‑protection measures into the architecture of technologies from inception.
- Governance Framework: Structured policies, procedures and oversight mechanisms that manage data lifecycle, security controls and regulatory compliance.