One Nation, One KYC: Why CKYC Is Becoming the Unified Identity Layer for India's Financial Sector

Back in 2013, when the idea of a Central KYC Registry first appeared in the Finance Ministry's plans, the vision was almost deceptively simple: complete your KYC once, anywhere in India's financial system, and never do it again. One customer, one record, usable by every bank, insurer, mutual fund, and broker that needed to verify who you were. It took a few more years before CERSAI operationalised the registry in 2016, but the ambition behind it was set out well before that, and it's an ambition I'd now put in the same category as Aadhaar or UPI: One Nation, One KYC, a single trusted financial identity layer for the entire country, not just a compliance form.

I've spent close to three decades on the banking side of India's digital infrastructure, at Deutsche Bank and then YES Bank, and I don't think I've come across many government ideas this clean. Which is exactly why what happened next is worth talking about honestly.

Where the design itself started to strain

CKYC 1.0 did what it set out to do, at least on paper. Documents got uploaded, KINs got issued, and by 2024 the registry held records for over 80 crore individuals. But a One Nation, One KYC system only works if the underlying registry can keep up with the country using it, and by the time UPI was processing hundreds of billions of transactions a year, CKYC 1.0's design was starting to look dated.

Records were uploaded in scheduled batches, so if something was wrong, you often didn't find out until the next cycle. Records were stored as scanned PDFs, which meant a forged photograph or an altered father's name could slip through more easily than anyone would like to admit. De-duplication logic was basic, so the same person could end up with more than one KIN scattered across the system. And perhaps the biggest gap in a registry meant to represent a single national identity: customers themselves had almost no visibility into their own record. You couldn't see who had accessed your data, or when, or why. The RBI eventually flagged customers onboarded through the older CKYC flow as carrying elevated risk, which was as clear a signal as any that the registry's foundations, not just its edges, needed rework.

Where regulated entities actually got stuck

Design gaps are one thing. Getting thousands of banks and NBFCs to actually run on the registry day-to-day is another, and that's where a lot of the real friction lived. Years of onboarding logic had been built around the old batch-upload model, and moving past it meant touching core banking systems that were never designed for real-time API calls in the first place. Small inconsistencies the old system simply tolerated, a name spelled slightly differently across PAN and Aadhaar, a mobile number that had not been re-seeded after someone switched carriers, suddenly needed to be caught before they reached the registry at all. The minor-to-major transition was another sticking point: when a young customer turns 18, their account should move automatically from guardian-linked to self-managed, but the registry never handled that on its own. It's the kind of gap that looks small in a slide deck and turns into a stalled onboarding journey in an actual branch.

What 2.0 actually changes

CKYC 2.0, announced in the 2025 Union Budget, is built to close both sets of gaps at once. It replaces the PDF-and-batch model with real-time API submissions in structured JSON, so a bad record gets rejected on the spot instead of days later. It adds AI-driven facial de-duplication to catch the same person hiding behind slightly different spellings of their name. It plugs into DigiLocker so documents can be retrieved and verified directly from the source, whether from UIDAI, transport authorities, or other issuing sources, instead of trusting a scanned copy. And it finally gives customers a self-service view of their own record, including who has accessed it and when, which is what a One Nation, One KYC system should have offered from day one.

Where things actually stand

I want to be careful here, because it's easy for a piece like this to get ahead of itself. CKYC 2.0 is not something that came into effect overnight. The core platform's rollout began earlier this year, and the migration is still happening in phases, with capabilities and reporting entities moving onto the new system gradually rather than all at once. That's the right way to do it, frankly. A registry meant to serve the better part of a billion people shouldn't be migrated in one big leap. But the honest answer, if you ask me today, is that we're mid-transition, not past it.

Why I think this is bigger than a compliance upgrade

CKYC often gets described as a compliance obligation, something reporting entities do because the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) requires it. I think that undersells what's actually being built. Put Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker next to CKYC 2.0 and the pattern is obvious: this is the same category of digital public infrastructure, just for financial identity instead of payments or document storage. Once the migration is complete, One Nation, One KYC stops being an aspiration from 2013 and becomes a real, working layer that every regulated institution in the country can build on top of.

That's also why CERSAI entrusting Protean with the system integrator mandate for CKYCRR 2.0 means something to me personally, beyond the business opportunity. It puts us inside the build of what I'd genuinely call India's next major DPI, not commenting on it from the sidelines. We've spent decades building population-scale platforms that sit exactly at this intersection, between what a regulator requires and what a bank's front-line staff and customers actually experience, and now that experience goes directly into the registry itself.

I am still early in this role, and most of what I am doing right now is listening: to our clients, to CERSAI, and to our own teams. But I already believe this: the vision set out in 2013 is finally close enough to see clearly. Getting the rest of the way there, phase by phase, is the work ahead of us.

About the Author

Mr. Ajay Rajan is MD & CEO at Protean eGov Technologies, with over three decades of leadership experience across banking, fintech, and digital transformation. Before joining Protean, he held senior leadership roles at YES Bank, where he served as Country Head – Transaction Banking, Government, Multinational & New Economy Business, IBU & Knowledge Units, and led key digital and DPI-linked initiatives. Prior to this, he spent over two decades with Deutsche Bank, where he held several leadership roles, including Global Head of Fintech. He has also been associated with strategic industry and regulatory committees and has spoken at national and international forums on banking, fintech, innovation, and digital transformation.