Fintech can solve financial needs
India Needs Low Cost, High Volume Products, Interoperability of Accounts and Flow-based Lending to Give a Push to Financial Integration: Shri
India needs a low cost, high volume products with interoperability of accounts and flow-based lending to give a push to financial integration, Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, has stressed.
“Financial Integration will lie in the sustained use of financial inclusion tools made available with the consumers”, said Kant told the CII Fintech and Digitisation Seminar on1 12 June 2020.
In its 125th year of service to the nation, CII had organised the 1st FinTech and Digitization Seminar with the theme ‘Preparing for the Post Pandemic World’ today.
The biggest thing will be solving Financial Inclusion and then achieving Financial Integration, he said.
“FinTech industry in India can solve India’s unique needs like financial inclusion, access to credit, limited insurance reach and also can serve as a solution provider of choice for the global financial sector to emerge as one of FinTech’s global hubs of choice, and that is really the potential of India going forward”.
He further added that Financial integration will be achieved by achieving parity across 3 layers, firstly, access to basics i.e. savings, equity markets and insurance; secondly availability of products and services and thirdly ability to choose and customize.
Kant highlighted that the key areas which need to be actualized to achieve financial integration are really to make ourselves presence-less, paperless and seamless with respect to on-boarding of customers. He also said that there is a need to address the prevalent KYC-paradigm and make it highly cost-effective, secure and real-time, by leveraging advances in technology.
He also spoke on the need to localise digital offerings by FinTech companies and allow for local dialects, languages for a holistic financial integration.
He emphasized that in India, vernacular was the way forward and that financial integration efforts were needed to localise the offerings and allow for local languages and dialects as opposed to using only English for deeper depth, wider audience and greater levels of customers.
“Forget English, Go Vernacular”, Shri Amitabh Kant said.
He also highlighted that through the usage of technology and digitization of processes, under DBT, Government has seamlessly transferred Rs.11.1 lakh crores in 426 operational schemes across 56 ministries, thus saving Rs.1.7 lakh crores by avoiding leakages.
As the Indian Fintech market matures, there will be huge opportunities for incumbents and new entrants to move up the adoption curve and expand the Indian Fintech pie, he added.
“To my mind favourable demographics, active start-up ecosystem and increasingly knowledgeable workforce, rising aspirations of the Indian millennial combined with the unique Financial Services ecosystem, provides several opportunities for FinTech companies to adapt and innovate” said Kant.
India has the digital infrastructure in place and now is the time to take a quantum jump forward so as to become a role model to the rest of the world, he told CII members.
Sanjiv Bajaj, Vice President, CII, added that the country’s digitization and technological efforts should be used in MedTech and in integrating hospitals, clinics and doctors. fiinews.com
