UPI Moment For Loans: RBI To Launch Unified Lending Interface For Seamless Credit To Small Borrowers

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is gearing up for the nationwide launch of a groundbreaking technology platform aimed at enabling seamless credit access across various sectors, with a particular focus on agriculture and MSME borrowers, announced RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das on Monday.

He was speaking at the inaugural address of the two-day Global Conference on Digital Public Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies in Bengaluru being held in commemoration of RBI’s 90th year.

"Continuing on this journey of digitalisation of banking services, last year we launched the pilot of a technology platform which enables frictionless credit. From now on, we propose to call it the Unified Lending Interface (ULI),” Das said.

The ULI platform is designed to facilitate the seamless and consent-based flow of digital information, including land records from various states, from multiple data service providers to lenders. This significantly reduces the time required for credit appraisal, particularly benefiting smaller and rural borrowers.

With its common and standardised APIs, ULI offers a 'plug and play' approach, ensuring digital access to information from diverse sources while minimising the complexity of multiple technical integrations.

"Just like UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transformed the payments ecosystem, we expect that ULI will play a similar role in transforming the lending space in India. The ‘new trinity’ of JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhar, Mobile)-UPI-ULI will be a revolutionary step forward in India’s digital infrastructure journey,” Das explained further.

He further emphasised that by digitising access to customers' financial and non-financial data, which otherwise remained scattered across different silos, ULI is poised to address the significant unmet demand for credit across various sectors, especially for agricultural and MSME borrowers.