Fintech In India An Outstanding Transformation
Digital transactions are the core of FinTech. Techie Karan Mehta, CTO and Co-Founder of Kissht with more than a decade of experience in FinTech, desires to convey his thoughts on how technological intervention transformed the area of finance, the contribution of FinTech towards India's economic recovery, and much more.
Karan Mehta holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science and Information Networking. Currently, he is working on building the entire lending life cycle product for consumers in India, making it absolutely digital and fully automated.
In 2013, the general thesis stated India was cash rich, made more cash transactions, and fell behind in digital transactions. Therefore this behavior looked like moving mountains; with that problem in mind, we started accepting credit cards and debit cards in a much simpler way. The challenge faced during that time was that India was moving too slowly to adopt a credit system. Hence we set up swipe with the company to build the product, and the team ran it for about two years.
We've tried to take it to the other parts of India, where consumers do not have easy access to credit. The approval rates with traditional banks and traditional forms of credit had a very high rejection rate. That's the problem Kissht wanted to solve; we created a lending product that can be taken to the masses, and people with bad credit history can also avail credit. In this way, we have been focusing on it for the last five years.
The Standpoint Of Technology In Accomplishing Financial Inclusion In India
Now India is universally acknowledged as a leader in digital payments. We bypass plastic; the reasoning leaps from the credit card, proprietary technology, and UPI adaptation. Therefore this real innovation has done the groundwork to build 10 million things on top of it; FinTech companies are sprouting up everywhere because the foundation of the Indian economies for digital transactions is vibrant. We've gone from absolutely bottom to the top of the list and top of the list with no close second economic pairing. What other economies are doing now is essentially trying to copy what has happened in India. What we are seeing right now is just the start. There will be innovation at every layer on top of that; we built a good strong foundation. And now it's going to be up to the FinTechs and the banks to create fantastic products on top of this solid foundation to the country.
The journey has been nothing short of astonishing if I compare 2013 to where we are right now. India was most definitely an absolute laggard when it came to digital transactions. A digital transaction forms the core of anything you want to do in FinTech. Now, in FinTech, if you wish to do insurance, loans, payments, anything you need, you will begin with digital transactions. If you look back to the number in 2013, the only modes of real-time transaction were NEFT and RTGS transactions. Before, we had to go to the bank and fill out a form. Hardly few Indian banks had NEFT and RTGS options on their website.
Fintechs – An Emerging Game Changer That Shifted To Mainstream In India
As discussed earlier, FinTech is going headstrong in India because of its strong foundation. In India, legitimate problems have always been multiplied by a population of 1.2 billion to 1.4 billion. Therefore any problem you solve is still an untapped market-leading that. India has a vast young population with a rapidly growing economy. Hence, this fantastic young population, who spend money according to lifestyle requirements such as shopping, transactions, and securing futures, requires much intervention from FinTechs.
If we consider Google Pay and PhonePe, they can be called poster children that are driving it into the mainstream not only for FinTech, but in general, everything because you can't get into the mainstream content of the customer site, you can't become a customer second nature, until unless you're solving a real problem, whether it's in the payment space, insurance space, lending space, or even in the stock in the equity trading space. By solving real fundamental problems in this way, FinTech has made itself mainstream.
Laying Down Some Suggestions For Forthcoming Fintech Solution Providers
This advice applies to pretty much all players equally. When you want to do financial inclusion, you need to create a process. I generally stick to is if you're going to go wide, you want to go long, if you're going to go deep, you have to move heaven and earth for what must be a truly 100% digital journey. People need to understand that additional effort into a highly polished product does not make a difference as long as you give them credit. Say, if I'm giving a loan, the customer will not care about whether the app looks fancy or not, which I believe is a big mistake.
The product should be a world class, rock solid, very well-finished product because every customer appreciates a highquality product. Although I am giving credit to a customer, I am giving him his private data in exchange. Hence, customers will trust your brand if your product is of very high quality.
There is an assumption that many people say that you can't start lending in an area where you don't have a collection presence. It's just that your credit model was not satisfactory enough to do a better job of identifying good and bad from that encoding. The challenges are okay; if my credit engine does a good job, we'll call the customer and complete the payment.
Future Of Fintech In India
India and other countries have already started building a path for the future of FinTech space. I foresee many private companies joining and FinTech getting regulated very strongly. The products we are seeing right now are accomplishing loans, making transactions payment on vaccines or echoing insurance transactions. They were just the beginning, and we are working on creating a better version of the existing products.
In another five to ten years from now, you'll start seeing new products come on board, you will probably see some of the synthetic consumable products or synthetic pharma, and you'll see new brands, new products created that we can't imagine. FinTech might also become invisible to the customer. An excellent example of that is in many places we are now starting to pay using wallets also in addition to UPI your identity may lead strongly into your bank account. And pretty much you walk into a store, buy items and do a checkout no need for credit cards and UPIs.
Karan Mehta holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science and Information Networking. Currently, he is working on building the entire lending life cycle product for consumers in India, making it absolutely digital and fully automated.
In 2013, the general thesis stated India was cash rich, made more cash transactions, and fell behind in digital transactions. Therefore this behavior looked like moving mountains; with that problem in mind, we started accepting credit cards and debit cards in a much simpler way. The challenge faced during that time was that India was moving too slowly to adopt a credit system. Hence we set up swipe with the company to build the product, and the team ran it for about two years.
India and other countries have already started building a path for the future of FinTech space. I foresee many private companies joining and FinTech getting regulated very strongly
We've tried to take it to the other parts of India, where consumers do not have easy access to credit. The approval rates with traditional banks and traditional forms of credit had a very high rejection rate. That's the problem Kissht wanted to solve; we created a lending product that can be taken to the masses, and people with bad credit history can also avail credit. In this way, we have been focusing on it for the last five years.
The Standpoint Of Technology In Accomplishing Financial Inclusion In India
Now India is universally acknowledged as a leader in digital payments. We bypass plastic; the reasoning leaps from the credit card, proprietary technology, and UPI adaptation. Therefore this real innovation has done the groundwork to build 10 million things on top of it; FinTech companies are sprouting up everywhere because the foundation of the Indian economies for digital transactions is vibrant. We've gone from absolutely bottom to the top of the list and top of the list with no close second economic pairing. What other economies are doing now is essentially trying to copy what has happened in India. What we are seeing right now is just the start. There will be innovation at every layer on top of that; we built a good strong foundation. And now it's going to be up to the FinTechs and the banks to create fantastic products on top of this solid foundation to the country.
The journey has been nothing short of astonishing if I compare 2013 to where we are right now. India was most definitely an absolute laggard when it came to digital transactions. A digital transaction forms the core of anything you want to do in FinTech. Now, in FinTech, if you wish to do insurance, loans, payments, anything you need, you will begin with digital transactions. If you look back to the number in 2013, the only modes of real-time transaction were NEFT and RTGS transactions. Before, we had to go to the bank and fill out a form. Hardly few Indian banks had NEFT and RTGS options on their website.
Fintechs – An Emerging Game Changer That Shifted To Mainstream In India
As discussed earlier, FinTech is going headstrong in India because of its strong foundation. In India, legitimate problems have always been multiplied by a population of 1.2 billion to 1.4 billion. Therefore any problem you solve is still an untapped market-leading that. India has a vast young population with a rapidly growing economy. Hence, this fantastic young population, who spend money according to lifestyle requirements such as shopping, transactions, and securing futures, requires much intervention from FinTechs.
If we consider Google Pay and PhonePe, they can be called poster children that are driving it into the mainstream not only for FinTech, but in general, everything because you can't get into the mainstream content of the customer site, you can't become a customer second nature, until unless you're solving a real problem, whether it's in the payment space, insurance space, lending space, or even in the stock in the equity trading space. By solving real fundamental problems in this way, FinTech has made itself mainstream.
Laying Down Some Suggestions For Forthcoming Fintech Solution Providers
This advice applies to pretty much all players equally. When you want to do financial inclusion, you need to create a process. I generally stick to is if you're going to go wide, you want to go long, if you're going to go deep, you have to move heaven and earth for what must be a truly 100% digital journey. People need to understand that additional effort into a highly polished product does not make a difference as long as you give them credit. Say, if I'm giving a loan, the customer will not care about whether the app looks fancy or not, which I believe is a big mistake.
The product should be a world class, rock solid, very well-finished product because every customer appreciates a highquality product. Although I am giving credit to a customer, I am giving him his private data in exchange. Hence, customers will trust your brand if your product is of very high quality.
There is an assumption that many people say that you can't start lending in an area where you don't have a collection presence. It's just that your credit model was not satisfactory enough to do a better job of identifying good and bad from that encoding. The challenges are okay; if my credit engine does a good job, we'll call the customer and complete the payment.
Future Of Fintech In India
India and other countries have already started building a path for the future of FinTech space. I foresee many private companies joining and FinTech getting regulated very strongly. The products we are seeing right now are accomplishing loans, making transactions payment on vaccines or echoing insurance transactions. They were just the beginning, and we are working on creating a better version of the existing products.
In another five to ten years from now, you'll start seeing new products come on board, you will probably see some of the synthetic consumable products or synthetic pharma, and you'll see new brands, new products created that we can't imagine. FinTech might also become invisible to the customer. An excellent example of that is in many places we are now starting to pay using wallets also in addition to UPI your identity may lead strongly into your bank account. And pretty much you walk into a store, buy items and do a checkout no need for credit cards and UPIs.
