One KYC across banks, brokers and insurers is being wired up

The three regulators that govern where your money sits have agreed a common framework for sharing know your customer records. With your consent, given through a secure mobile OTP, a KYC completed with one regulated entity can be reused by another instead of starting again.

Anyone who has opened a demat account after already having a bank account, or bought a policy after both, knows the problem it solves. The same PAN, the same Aadhaar, the same address proof, submitted a third time, verified a third time, and rejected a third time over a mismatch in how a street name was abbreviated.

Two things are worth watching as this rolls out. Consent is the mechanism, so read what you are consenting to share rather than tapping through the OTP screen. And a single reusable record means a single point of error: if your address is wrong in the shared record, it is now wrong in more places at once. Checking it once, properly, is worth more than it used to be.