Role of FinTech in an evolving society : Insights on some of the defining technologies
By Varun Sridhar, Lead realme PaySa
In the new India, a lot is changing in the life of a consumer and small businesses. Its tough to have a 3 or 5 year goal, to predict how long will we live in which city or in which apartment, what we will spend our money on, how long will a relationship last, what new way of business or an incident will make the business a success or bankrupt in few hours, urban transportation going from ownership to sharing to monthly fee based, long big commitments going to smaller bit sized transactions, environment & sustainability more important than lower price and maybe most importantly physical connect getting replaced by bytes/emoticons & touch screens. The India, we all knew is rapidly evolving and financial services is forced to change to support this growth. In the case of fintech or techfin, the assumption be default is that they will work towards building this new India and generate value.
The fashionable tag of fintech, comes with a lot of pressure to generate value for the company, profits for the shareholders and most importantly real customer problems. Most new age players, like realmePaySa are working on solving 5 problems:
- Credit to segments which don’t have access to credit and for those who do how to make it more convenient and faster?
- Replace cash completely with mobile payments and more importantly automate all accounting, settlement, taxes and records between people and businesses
- Make savings and investing in capital markets easier for India and Bharat and bring the costs of managing ones wealth more efficient & simpler
- Insure all assets created with a lot of hardwork, including one’s life, in a simple & cheap way and do this both for the urban educated population & rural India
- Generate a solid, useable, shareable digital & financial data foot print allowing customer to leverage their ‘fin-digital score’ to get better & lower cost access to financial services products
At realmePaysa, we are in different phases of launch or studying different technologies to solve some of the above problems. 3 things that we could highlight are:
– Customer financial well being score: Combination of digital data, financial data, machine learning algorithms, basics of credit risk and savings potential analysis we plan to be able to provide the customer an overall score. This could help in getting better approvals from lenders or lower interest rates or better SIPs and so on!
– The next innovation in digital payments will happen by developing solutions combining the UPI platform, OS in the mobile and the phone hardware. Taking QR code scanning from a 4 click process to an intuitive 1 click experience without launching anything is the future or a whole supply chain of a potato chip manufacturer auto linked up using UPI, a software and your phone will make retail trade faster, cheaper and more efficient
– In mutual funds, the biggest issue is to educate millions of clients who are saving regularly and once done to be able to justify the cost of acquisition & education as compared to the small revenue per customer given the small savings. Combining mobile phone platform with a strong savings platform lowers the entry barrier and maybe we should have soon in India a 1 Rupee mutual fund and every uber driver could save after every ride or everytime you pay digitally to someone the plaform could shift 1 rupee to your savings piggy bank and so on, the solutions are endless
More than the technology itself, it’s to get the magic recipe right – solving some issue for someone in India or Bharat is essential, combining the mobile platform with financial services can be very very powerful and lastly data can act as the X factor provided customer privacy, data security are fully respected.
