• Buoyed by the success of digitalisation of financial services, the Reserve Bank OF India (RBI) will be launching Unified Lending Interface (ULI).

• It is a platform to ensure frictionless flow of credit, especially for smaller and rural borrowers.

• Last year, the Reserve Bank had launched a pilot of a technology platform which enables frictionless credit in two states.

• The ULI platform facilitates seamless and consent-based flow of digital information, including even land records of various states, from multiple data service providers to lenders.

• RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said the ULI will cut the time taken for credit appraisal, especially for smaller and rural borrowers. 

• The ULI architecture has common and standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), designed for a ‘plug and play’ approach to ensure digital access to information from diverse sources.

• This reduces the complexity of multiple technical integrations and enables borrowers to get the benefit of seamless delivery of credit, quicker turnaround time without requiring extensive documentation.

• By digitising access to the customer’s financial and non-financial data that otherwise resided in disparate silos, ULI is expected to cater to large unmet demand for credit across various sectors, particularly for agricultural and MSME borrowers.

• Just like Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transformed the payments ecosystem, we expect that ULI will play a similar role in transforming the lending space in India, the RBI governor said.

• He emphasised that the new trinity of JAM-UPI-ULI will be a revolutionary step forward in India’s digital infrastructure journey. JAM refers to Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile.

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