Rise of fintech 2.0- transforming fintech through disruptive innovation

CTO Conversations at The Forbes India AWS The Mavericks Event

Forbes India, AWS, and IvyCap Ventures hosted an event titled 'The Mavericks' at the ITC Windsor in Bengaluru, where industry professionals addressed the idea of a future-ready Fintech organization.

Are data platforms key drivers for inclusive innovation? With tech tools coming to the forefront, crafting seamless experiences and the modern tech stack are the need of the hour. The discussions also revolved around how with growth comes security issues which disruptive innovations have helped battle.

Welcome address by Manu Balachandran, Associate Editor, Forbes India

The marquee event began with a welcome address where he shared his thoughts on the growing Indian fintech market valued at $31 billion at the end of 2021. He then highlighted how funding for the industry, which has tripled since 2021 because of its promising future, naturally reflects this potential. In addition, the neo-banking sector in the country has seen a fivefold increase in funding in the same period, with projections putting it at $215 billion by 2030.

(From Left to Right)- Bhupendra Kumar- AWS | Siddharth Patnaik- Upstox | Narendra Babu- PayU India | Karthikeyan Krishnaswamy- KreditBee | Anshul Rai- Happay | Sashank Rishyasringa – Axio | Rajeev Agrawal- Innoviti Technologies | Satinder Singh- AWS | Ashish Wadhwani- IvyCap Ventures.

CTO Conversation: Transforming Fintech through disruptive Innovation

The CTO conversation at The Mavericks spotlighted discussions and revelations on how disruptive innovation and tech tools are transforming the future of fintechs. Moderated by Manu Balachandran, Associate Editor, Forbes India, the panel discussion was represented by technology visionaries like Satinder Singh, Head, Solution Architects (India), DNB, AWS, Narendra Babu, CTO, PayU India, Siddharth Patnaik, Senior Distinguished Engineer at Upstox, and Karthikeyan Krishnaswamy, Co-Founder and CTO, KreditBee.

What are the biggest transformations underway in the fintech landscape from a business and technological point of view today? Sharing his thoughts on the same Narendra Babu said, "In the context of fintech, you have access to your finances anywhere, anytime due to technology. With this, it unlocks a tremendous amount of potential.

Technology has brought down the cost and barriers to operation. In fintech, India is at the forefront of solving problems like KYC, checking out and seeing many redirections, making a Demat account, etc. The gamut of problems that fintech is trying to solve to make it easier for people through better use cases, functionality, value-added services and more is phenomenal. The previous under-serviced customer base has access to a variety of services today."

Continuing this topic, Karthikeyan Krishnaswamy said, "This is a special period. If COVID happened 15 years back, the situation today would be very different. Similarly, cloud computing didn't exist 20 years ago. There have been a lot of factors that have been built over time to disrupt and transform the fintech industry.

Impact of tech enablers on customer accessibility

Moreover, 4G services, smartphone penetration and more have been made accessible to customers. India has jumped certain steps because of the market size, tech-enablers, cost of access to technology, ease of access to technology, the democratization of data like KYC services, AA license, etc."

Is India's technological landscape right enough at this point to bring in innovative disruption in the finech space? Sharing his thoughts on the same, Siddharth Patnaik said, "A couple of factors are contributing to the era we are in. Recent government initiatives like e-KYC, online PAN verification, Digilocker, and India Stack, have solved the identity problem. UPI has brought about a massive change in the payment sector. Apart from this, data accessibility and affordability of smartphones by millenials is driving transformation."

How has the landscape evolved as far as technology is concerned? Sharing his thoughts, Satinder Singh said, "Fintech is a pretty diverse industry and technological factors play an important role. My top three picks in terms of use-case the first would be scalability, data accessibility, and IoT. We saw a massive scale in service provided to customers. The traditional architectures were tested in a massive way putting every plan into re-architecturing."

Conclusion

Technological innovations are creating massive disruptions in the fintech industry. Innovations like the ease of onboarding customers, catering to their needs, digitization, security, and personalization will pave the way for further escalation of fintech in India.