Fintech

“India has emerged as a key market for the fintech industry in terms of the number of fintech players quantum of investments received and even the volume of fintech transactions undertaken. Digital payments and wallets have so far been the flag-bearer of Indian fintech market fuelled heavily on the demand side by favourable demographic factors and on the supply side by the enabling policy and regulatory framework such as Aadhar Jan Dhan Yojana India stack. As to the future in my view the digital lending space is at the cusp of revolution. This has been apparent by the steady growth of this space through the past decade. The unique Indian demography innovative financial products along with policy initiatives such as the account aggregator framework will serve as key drivers. Additionally with versatility being increasingly considered as marker of strength another expected trend in the coming years is the organic and inorganic expansion of established single segment fintech players into other related fintech segments and the consequent bouquet-service offerings by them.Lastly the focus of fintech firms will now extensively need to be towards the continued strengthening of customer trust such as by investing in cyber-security infrastructure as that is now being increasingly recognized as the necessary foundation for growth of the fintech industry. Despite the devastating impact of Covid-19 on several industries the fintech industry managed to stay afloat during the initial few months of 2020 and emerge stronger in the later months. Within the fintech industry the impact has been sector specific ofcourse with exceptions. While payments particularly UPI payments and insure-tech continued to have a strong foothold given contact-less payment mode preferred by many during Covid -19 retail digital lending had a muted growth albeit for a short duration. Despite such variations overall the move to a deeper digital economy has only been accelerated during Covid-19 which significantly cushioned the adverse impacts of the pandemic on the fintech industry.“