of the AA system and I thought I'll put some thoughts on the table. Now one way to think about this is to look at how AA is performing with the two other big platforms we have, Aadhaar and UPI. Now in Aadhaar we have 9 crore authentications per day, that's 90 million authentications a day, and 1.5 crore eKYCs, that is to open bank accounts, get mobile connections, open mutual funds and so on. And as you know we have 1.38 billion people, so 95% of adults are now enrolled in Aadhaar.
If you look at UPI, we're talking about 75 crore or 750 million transactions, approaching a billion a day soon, and 4 million recurring UPI mandates per day. This was nothing two years back, and about 45 to 50% of adults. Today we have about 550 million monthly active users on UPI, but so that's about half the adults. Account aggregator is doing 10 lakh consents per day and 1.2 crore data pools. So it's quite large, but only 20% of adults are using the account aggregator.
So if you say that, if you look at the thing, that there's a huge potential for account aggregator to grow because there's no reason why half a billion people cannot be using account aggregator. So we have the infrastructure in place, we have everything in place. Now it's about deepening and broadening the use of AA and taking it up to 50% plus of adults. This will really be a big thing in the next two to three years.
Now I think the AA system has delivered. It's taken a long time. This year is the 10th anniversary of the master directive issued by RBI on the account aggregator ecosystem. It was issued on September 2nd, 2016. We're now in October, exactly 10 years and one month later. I think we're finally at a point where we can say the AA system has delivered. But now it's time to give it more responsibility, to make it a full citizen of the digital infrastructure of the country. And we really think there are three things which are required.
One is more supply. The beauty of the AA system is that every time you add one more supply of data, instantly everybody can use it. So if there are 100 FIUs and one new FIP is added, all the 100 FIUs can use the data. So that's a very important thing, that more supply is very important. And the other important thing about the AA system is that while it is run and regulated by RBI, the AA system is designed for the entire financial regulatory system of India, which means it's at the FSDC level.
So a standard then are used by Mr. S at IRDA, Mr. Raman at PFRDA, RBI of course, Mr. Pande at SEBI and so on. So the fact that the same infrastructure will be used by all financial regulators gives us a chance to dramatically increase the supply of data on the AA system. Then we have to look at more use cases.
I think if you look at the conversation even earlier, the report and all that, we are heavily focused on lending, which is a good thing because we want to make lending a big thing. But we want to first take lending to the unbanked, and it was very heartening to see that the new-to-credit were increasing thanks to AA. So we obviously have to make it more inclusive, get more people to get loans, but we also have to go beyond lending. How do we use it for pensions? How do we use it for personal finance? How do we use it for insurance claims?
And therefore, I think, how do we create more inclusion on lending as well as going beyond lending. Ultimately, AA is the single channel for every financial data need. So every FIP in the country should use more and more data from AA. And this has a network effect. The more people on the system, the more value. So we really create a sort of increasing-returns kind of environment. So we have to do all this in the coming years.
So if you look at the categories, the bulk of the people today are salaried, because salary is easy, because they have a bank account and they can give the bank statement. But we have to go beyond salaried, because salary is just one part of our ecosystem. We have to go to the self-employed and small businesses, very important to get them access to credit. We have to go to gig workers and nano enterprises. We have millions and millions of gig workers. How do we make sure that they have access to the same things?
And then of course we want to get to street vendors and SHG women borrowers. We want that lady on the street who's selling vegetables to get daily credit to buy supplies. That's our dream of what AA should do. So we have to look at more and more people. That's on the category of customers. And then in the category of use cases you have personal finance advisory, insurance, government schemes. Now more and more government schemes would benefit from better data from the AA system, and discussions are happening there.
Scholarship funding, there's a huge amount of CSR money going into scholarships. They can use AA to figure out the beneficiaries. Tax planning, visa processing. Why should you not go to get your visa and that embassy will use the AA system to verify the documents are accurate and authentic? Because as you know there's a lot of fraud in this visa business, people supplying documents. So there's another use case. So there's no shortage. It's up to our imagination to come up with the use cases.
So if you think of this, if you can increase the category of people who use AA and the use cases, you're going to create a dramatic explosion in the AA system, and that should be our endeavor, so that every use case, everything is using AA for every category of people. So this is the potential of AA, and we need to realize this potential in the next two to three years.
And the power of AA comes from the combination of data as you add more FIPs to the system. So if you have GST data plus income tax returns plus current account, that is the basis for cash flow lending for small business and self-employed. If you take the banking data, SHG data and livelihood data, that is the basis for lending to women SHG borrowers. If you take banking plus EPFO, as more and more people are on the EPFO platform, you create unsecured lending plus salary.
And therefore the AA system is very, very inclusive, because historically lending in India was based on what assets you own. But a person does not own any assets. How do they get access to credit? They get access to credit by monetizing the data streams, and that's what we do here. So it's a very inclusive idea. And then health data plus financial data can be the basis for insurance expansion.
So fundamentally, as you add more sources of data to the system, the way you mix and match these data sources to create new categories of lending and new categories of products is all possible. That's why it's so important, our ability to mix and match things in this system.
Now today we have live on AA deposits, insurance folios, securities, investments, pensions and GST partially, but we have to bring many more on. We have to get income tax returns. People should be able to share their income tax returns to get access to something. People, EPFO, now more and more people are registering on EPFO. I should be able to share my EPFO data and use that to get some service. Small savings schemes, millions of Indians buy small savings.
Self-help group data which is with the National Rural Livelihood Mission, government securities with CCIL, joint accounts, FASTag, the millions and millions of cars and trucks, the truck drivers can use FASTag data to get access to new products. Utility bills, BBPS has a huge number of bill payments that you can use. So fundamentally if you look everywhere there are so many categories of financial data. Over the next one or two years we have to bring all these people onto the system. Every one you add makes the system deeper and better.
So I think we have to think of this as an opportunity to transform India into a productive, inclusive, data-driven system. Please note there is nowhere else on the planet where there is a system like AA. This is really a unique invention and innovation in India. And the whole idea is, how do we use technology to create empowerment? How do you use technology to enable inclusion? How do you take people who are outside the system and bring them into the system?
This is a huge thing for the country. And that's why we feel we should go beyond just the salaried guy and beyond the big companies. We have to go to the nano enterprises, self-help groups, street vendors, gig workers, self-employed individuals. We have to systematically get each category of people into the system and make sure that they have access to a wide variety of products, whether it's loans or mutual funds or whatever it is. So this is something we believe in.
It's also important to realize why this is strategic for India. What is happening today is we are all concerned about AI, and as you know, as it is around the world, jobs are not growing at the speed that you need, and so there's a lot of job concern around the world, not just in India but around the world. And AI only makes it more, at least the perception is that AI will make it more difficult because jobs will get automated.
So AI will automate service jobs and robots will automate manufacturing jobs. So then everybody's saying, what's left? So therefore, what is the growth model that you choose to make sure that more and more people can be employed and more and more people can be employed in a way that the jobs are safe? And my thesis on this is that this can only come by enabling millions of small businesses.
In other words, you will continue to have large companies, you'll continue to have exports and all that, but really the big growth will come from enabling millions of small businesses, all of whom will create a few jobs. In other words, a small business is much more AI job-proof. Why is that? Because a small business has two, three, four employees and they do different things at different points in the day.
In the morning they take the supplies. In the afternoon they put the supplies on the shelf. In the evening they go and deliver. So in a small business you cannot really systematically identify the tasks that people do. People do many, many tasks, and once you do many, many tasks, AI can't do that. So the nature of small business is that it's fundamentally going to be much more AI job-proof, and that's something that we can enable in India.
So if you look at it, if you take a view of what's happening, essentially we are creating an infrastructure for the birth and growth of millions of small companies. Now we have two types of small companies. We have traditional companies, retailers, small manufacturers. We have millions of them. If you look at just the GST data, when GST was launched a few years back, you had maybe three or four million registered GST companies. Today we have 14 million companies on the GST platform.
Which means the advent of these tax systems, GST and all that, has increased the formalization. So we have traditional companies, 14 million just in GST, and maybe 63 million small companies. The lady selling vegetables on the street is an entrepreneur. So we have more and more entrepreneurs. And then we have the new-wave entrepreneurs.
If you look at what's happening in the startup economy, we had less than 10,000 startups in 2016. I think today we would have more than 150,000 startups, and I believe that by 2035 we will have one million startups. So we have two engines of entrepreneurial growth: traditional companies and the new startups. And in many ways they also work with each other. So you'll have a company in the startup space helping the small business to file taxes online. So the whole thing is all working together.
So if we can build an infrastructure ecosystem where millions of businesses can do better, then that's how the jobs are going to happen. And effectively what we're doing is, through the AA system, we are unlocking data for everyone, we are making sure that everybody can use it for a variety of products. We are unlocking market access, so small business can get market access. So you get market access through ONDC and all other platforms which are there also.
So in the market you get access to credit and other financial services through the AA system. Then AI will enable many more things. A small business or a small farmer will now have access to information on par with the big guy. So essentially we are removing the arbitrage opportunity for big guys, because a small guy can get on his phone, in a language of his choice, he can get access to the best information in the world.
Tomorrow the weather data will all be online and I can get microclimate details for my crop and my area. All kinds of things can happen. And then you're going to have this whole AI to make your business run simpler, AI to make compliance better, and so on and so forth. So you'll have access to expertise, knowledge and so on. And similarly the government in turn is looking at major initiatives to decriminalize and deregulate our rules and regulations.
So all these things coming together will lead to us. And India is an entrepreneurial country. So if you unleash entrepreneurship and make it easier for entrepreneurs to grow, rather than look at a few large companies hiring more people, if you have 10 million small businesses hiring five people each, that's 50 million jobs, and those jobs are AI-proof. So fundamentally I think we have to recalibrate the paradigm of growth.
The old model, the benign geopolitical environment for 40 years which allowed other countries to grow and take advantage of global markets, is no longer visible. Geopolitics has become extremely complicated. Everybody is weaponizing technology and market access and geography. So we're really in a different world. So the real thing we need to focus on is how do we create domestic growth by having millions of entrepreneurs, unleashing their capability, simplifying things for them, and making sure that each of them creates jobs.
And AA is part of this larger vision of enabling jobs at scale through small businesses. So that I think is a very important takeaway for us. So it's not just that we want AA to work, we want AA to work as a strategic piece of the architecture of India's future.
So what are the enablers for the next orbit? We talked about interoperability. We're very happy and grateful to RBI because just last week they announced interoperability. Why is this important? Because otherwise the onboarding of players was becoming much more complicated. If you have to connect to every AA, you spend a lot of time, but interoperability means that you connect to one and then you get access to all of them. So I think interoperability is being tackled. I think the standards are coming out, inter-standards. So we should be good there.
And then we need to have participatory governance. SATI is now an official SRO, and all of you have to work together to make sure that you work with all the... Look at the amazing thing that all the regulators are here today. Mr. Ramachandran spoke from RBI, Mr. Raman is here from PFRDA, Mr. Shett is there from IRDA, Mr. Pande will come from SEBI. So it's amazing that the full regulatory ecosystem is fully supportive of this whole thing.
And we have to make this work, and then we have to make economic models work. You have to make sure that the people who provide data get some compensation and so on. The account aggregators themselves have to make some fee income. You can't completely rely on a free system, and we have done that effectively in Aadhaar with a small charge for Aadhaar authentication and KYC, with UPI with this MDR and all that, which is coming after Diwali I'm told.
So I guess we don't want to charge people before Diwali, but we have to have economic models because finally if players in the ecosystem have to sustain themselves, they have to use these economic models. So this is something we have to do very quickly, but I think we're on the way.
So today apart from this, there's a whole idea that we will make the consumer more literate. If you want to go from 20% of adults using AA to 50%, we have to make everyone demand their data. Today it's a push thing. It has to be a pull thing. Everybody should say, I want to use the AA system to get my data, to get a better loan or a better insurance policy or whatever. So these guys are launching the AA Sahayak as a consumer-facing thing, and now they will show you the videos. Thank you very much.
