The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority of India (PFRDA) has introduced the launch of an Aadhaar-based e-KYC (know-your-customer) facility. If an individual desires to open Atal Pension Yojana (APY) account, he/she will accomplish that by verifying particulars with Aadhaar based mostly on an e-KYC course online.

The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority of India (PFRDA) announced the launch of this facility via a circular dated October 27, 2021.

“Now in order to further increase the outreach and simplify the process of subscription, CRA (Central Recordkeeping Agency) would be providing digital onboarding based through Aadhaar e-KYC as an additional option. Aadhaar XML-based onboarding has already been made available for the benefit of Subscribers. These processes are paperless,” said the PFRDA circular.

How it works

The PFRDA circular said that the information fetched from the prospective subscribers through e KYC technology framework viz Aadhaar details, demographic information, pension amount, mode of payment, etc. shall be shared with the respective banks where the subscribers’ savings bank account is maintained through online information exchange for setting up of auto-debit for the specified amount/mode. Post opening of the APY account, the subsequent servicing of subscribers would be offered by the respective APY-SP.

Further, all the APY accounts are to be seeded with the Aadhaar number for which the CRA will be providing functionality for facilitating the Aadhaar seeding of the existing APY subscribers through the proper consent mechanism. Additionally, APY-SPs can also collect the Aadhaar details from their associated subscribers with due consent which would then be shared with CRA for seeding.

CRA is advised to engage with all APY-SPs for system-level integration so as to provide the functionality viz e KYC based APY on-boarding and consent framework for Aadhaar seeding at the earliest said PFRDA circular.