Tag: Digital Finance
Digital technologies are evolving at an unprecedented rate. Major innovations, such as artificial intelligence tools, machine learning software, cloud computing resources, and big data, have already reshaped the landscape of countless industries and actualized new financial concepts such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
As business leaders apply these technologies to their digital transformation initiatives, many focus on functions like sales, customer support, and demand forecasting. While these are mission-critical functions, finance must be front and center during any digital transformation discussion.
Whether your team manages a standalone financial business or is responsible for overseeing an organization’s financial functions, you must embrace the digital world. Let’s take a closer look at the financial technology (FinTech) landscape, identify some ongoing challenges facing the financial industry, and shed light on some tech trends you can adopt to strengthen your competitive advantage.
Read more: Top Ways Business Intelligence In Finance Can empower CFOs Today!
The Financial Business Technology Landscape
FinTech is primarily responsible for the evolution of the financial business landscape, and over the last few years, the FinTech sector has exploded. As of 2023, there are more than 26,000 FinTech startups globally, as well as hundreds of pre-established FinTech developers.
The growth of the FinTech market has largely been supported by venture capital (VC) funding. Though numerous FinTech sectors have received significant financing from VC rounds, three stand above the rest.
Between 2016 and 2021, the following three sectors received over $5 billion in VC funding:
- Capital markets ($8.07B)
- Payments ($6.03B)
- Wealth management ($5.43B)
Digital lending, FinTech tools for small-to-medium-sized businesses, and banking-related projects also received significant funding, though these amounts fell below the $5B mark.
The Top Challenges Facing the Finance Industry
The modern financial business landscape has largely been shaped by uncertainty, market volatility, rapidly shifting consumer trends, and the emergence of increasingly sophisticated technologies.
Businesses in virtually every industry continue to face disruptions and supply chain challenges, hurdles that have placed an additional burden on finance teams, as they are tasked with helping their organizations prepare for the unexpected. Unfortunately, antiquated solutions and strategies don’t provide the agility necessary to promote adequate resilience.
From the financial business perspective, the digital world has led to the development of two new core challenges: accessibility and racing to keep up.
First, consumers expect to be able to access services, accounts, and support on their terms. To meet this demand, financial businesses must develop user-friendly mobile apps that increase the accessibility of their services and work to empower consumers.
The second challenge is interconnected with the first: New technologies are arising so rapidly that some businesses need help to keep pace. Those that struggle fall behind in the digital arms race will cause financial organizations to lose valuable market shares, potentially fading into obscurity.
Read more: Technology in Finance: What to look out for in 2023!
Changing Finance to Thrive in the Digital World
Fortunately, organizations can overcome these challenges by adopting finance technology trends and implementing robust new software solutions.
Organizations committed to reinventing themselves must develop a cohesive digital transformation strategy. As part of the process, business leaders must identify any functions and processes that need to be retired, updated, or improved. From there, they can then begin exploring solutions to enhance the agility and versatility of their business.
Conducting extensive market research is also essential to digital transformation. Financial businesses need to step into the minds of their audience and determine what features, capabilities, and tech services are at the top of their priority lists. Only then can businesses strategically invest in new technologies and solutions that will align with the needs of modern consumers.
Finance Technology Trends that Can Give Your Business an Edge
If your organization is on the precipice of a digital transformation but is still determining where to focus its efforts, examining current FinTech trends is an excellent place to start. A few of the trends in the finance industry include:
1. Self-Service Tools
Most consumers lead hectic lives, which means that many of them don’t want to have to stop in a branch or waste precious time seeking phone-based support. Instead, they’d prefer to have access to user-friendly self-service tools so that they can access support or manage their account whenever is most convenient for them.
Therefore, you should implement customer-facing tools and features that empower your consumers. The easier your services are to access, the better, so make sure that clients can reach these tools via various channels, including desktop and mobile devices.
2. Sophisticated Mobile Apps
The rise of digital-only banking has forever changed customer expectations regarding financing. Digital financial institutions have shown consumers that managing every aspect of an account is possible without ever setting foot in a branch.
While you do not necessarily have to transition to a digital-only business model, you need to provide your consumers with access to a high-quality mobile app that is easy to navigate, simple to use, and reliable.
3. Embedded Finance
The embedded finance technology ecosystem has become too big to ignore. By joining this growing sector, you can create new revenue streams and expand your organization’s reach within the finance industry.
Of the various types of embedded finance solutions, “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) has become especially popular. It is a sales model that allows customers to make purchases immediately but pay for the goods via a set number of more-affordable installments. In 2021, BNPL transactions totaled over $120B, and they are expected to reach a value of $576B by 2026.
Read more: How Embedded Finance will Transform the FinTech Landscape in 2023!
Reinvent Your Finance Business with Fingent!
According to Deloitte, the rapidly-growing FinTech industry will reach a market size of $188 billion by the end of 2024. This statistic illustrates how bank executives and business leaders across the financial industry are embracing digital transformation. In fact, 66.7% of bank executives believe FinTech will “impact wallets and mobile payments globally,” according to Statista researchers.
If your organization wants to keep pace with forward-thinking financial businesses, it must reinvent itself for the digital world. Fingent can help you do that via our financial software development services. We develop highly-secure, purpose-built solutions, such as cash management software, mobile and internet banking apps, digital finance and accounting tools, and other applications that will enable you to thrive in this rapidly evolving industry.
The pandemic is now the biggest and most critical challenge of traditional banking. Some of these challenges are revenue pressure, data security, customer service management, data collection and analysis, risk management, and so on. These are the warning lights and alarm bells that call for caution over emerging risks. AI (Artificial Intelligence) has gained recognition as an effective solution.
AI is empowering the banking industry to provide individualized frictionless customer experiences. It is driving customer loyalty and profitability by automating banking processes.
In this article, we will discuss how AI can resolve banking challenges. We will also discuss some of the common challenges banks might encounter in implementing AI and how a tech partner can help deploy AI better.
How AI Can Resolve Banking Challenges?
AI is the new electricity – Andrew Ng.
Modern technology such as AI can be tailored to the specific needs of the banking sector. The digital age is opening up new opportunities. According to a Business Insider research report, banks are expected to save an estimated $447 billion by 2023 with the help of AI applications. Given that, here is how AI can resolve some challenges.
Read more: Digital Transformation in Financial Services: All You Need to Know
1. AI-enabled conversational interfaces
Chatbots are one of the most popular cases of applying AI in banking. Bots are programmed to communicate with thousands of customers with minimum expense. Insider Intelligence estimates that the adoption of chatbots could save the banking sector $11 billion annually by 2023.
Mobile banking has become the most popular and chatbot services attract users’ attention and create a unique brand identity. AI functionality in mobile apps is helping banks generate more revenue than when customers visit their branches. Banking organizations that leverage AI improve their quality of services and remain competitive despite the crisis.
2. AI-enabled data collection and analysis
Banks generate an enormous amount of data every day. Collecting and recording this data is an overwhelming task for employees. Besides, all this work may be a wasted effort if there is no proper plan to use this data. Hence banks need to determine the relationship between the collected data. That is another major challenge.
AI-based apps improve the user experience by collecting and analyzing data. The collected data then can be used to grant loans or fraud detection.
3. AI-enabled Risk management
Providing loans is a challenging task for bankers. Extension of credit to a fraudster can get the bank into difficulties. Or a borrowers’ economic downturn can adversely affect the bank. 2020 statistics show that credit card delinquencies in the US alone rose by 1.4% in a duration of six months.
AI-enabled systems can appraise a customer’s credit history more accurately. Additionally, AI-powered mobile banking apps track financial transactions and analyze user data to help banks anticipate the risks associated with the extension of credit.
4. AI-powered data security
Credit card fraud is on the rise. It is the most common type of personal data theft. AI-powered systems can analyze customer behavior, location, and financial habits. So, if it detects any unusual activity, it triggers a security mechanism immediately.
Read more: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: The Cyber Security Heroes Of FinTech
When all these challenges are successfully tackled, how does the AI-powered bank look like? Read on to find out.
How Does The AI-First Bank Look Like?
AI-bank rises to meet customers’ expectations and remain competitive. The AI-powered bank will offer intelligent and personalized propositions and experiences as it understands customers’ past behavior. It can span across multiple devices providing a consistent experience to its customers.
What Are The Common Challenges Banks Might Face In Implementing AI?
Implementing AI technology in banking is not always easy. You need to ensure you have the right team and expertise. You will also need access to data, resources to invest in the project, and parties that are willing to adopt the new technology.
- Access to data: It is one of the biggest challenges to implementing AI. Additionally, banks might face challenges with training data. It becomes hard to update or improve the AI models if the team does not have the necessary information to use and learn from.
- Localization: Localization is critical to the banking sector as they often need to design models with multiple markets that they serve. Localization can help you properly customize the customer experience. Your data partner can support you with localization as they have skilled linguists to develop aspects such as style guides and voice persona.
- Security and compliance: It is quite challenging to keep all the data confidential and secure. The right data partner can offer a variety of security options. They have security standards to ensure your customers’ data is securely handled. Look for data partners who have strong data protection with certifications and regulations. They will be able to provide secure annotation. They will also provide onsite service options, private cloud deployment, on-premise deployment, and so on.
- Trust, transparency, and explainability: AI models can only be successful if they can be understood and trusted by customers as they will want to be sure that their personal information is handled and stored securely. Talk to your partner and ask them to explain the model to you. Or you can always go back to the training data that was used to develop the model and extract some explainability.
- Data pipelines: Connecting data pipeline components to use siloed data is not as easy as it seems. To do this effectively, banking institutions must ensure their data is collected and structured correctly. They must also ensure that this information enables ML models to predict according to the business goals. Look for a partner with extensive security offering as their expertise will enable your banking service company to be successful and scale.
Read more: The New Untapped Opportunities for FinTech Companies in the Coming Years
How A Tech Partner Like Fingent Help Deploy AI Better?
Implementing AI into banking is a serious responsibility. It takes in-depth knowledge, an enormous amount of time, and dedication to accuracy. That is what Fingent has. We do not just follow the trends. Instead, we focus on how AI can add value to your particular banking needs.
Fingent can bring transparency and explainability of AI automated decision making to your banking processes. We can provide an easy-to-use interface through APIs delivered either on-premise, in the cloud, or as a SaaS offering.
By embedding AI and ML into our products, we can accelerate the release of explainable business models that will underpin new AI use cases. These can help create a seamless customer journey and automate manual processes with self-learning capabilities. We are confident that we can help you deploy AI better. Give us a call and let’s get talking.
Business Intelligence in Finance becomes the most trusted aide of the modern CFO. Here’s how BI helps finance teams to leverage insights and drive the business forward.
Business Intelligence In Finance: A CFO’s Most Reliable Tool
In 2020 alone, 64.2ZB of data was created or replicated by many industries. However, 73% of the enterprise data is left unused for business analytics and intelligence. Several studies prove that business intelligence in finance enables enterprises to reap ROI and profitability and boost customer retention. In one of its recent reports, Tech Jury reveals that effective utilization of big data allowed Netflix to save $1 billion per year on customer retention.
Is Business Intelligence worth putting time into? If you’re a CFO, then it might be a good idea to investigate this further. After all, time is worth money, and BI does come with costs.
In our experience, we know that it is worth it. A CFO can use BI to harvest business-critical insights and drive value through process improvement. This blog presents some key facts that show why Business Intelligence in finance is crucial for CFOs.
Read more: How Odoo ERP Helps Leverage Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is a tool that is often misunderstood and usually underutilized by finance organizations. Business Intelligence in banking uses analytics software to create interactive data visualization. BI covers a broader range of functions that include querying, data mining, data preparation, and so on.
Data thus collected is an invaluable asset that allows finance organizations to understand themselves better and make informed decisions.
Read more: Business Intelligence 101
Why Must CFOs Understand The Significance Of BI In Finance?
As financial organizations recover from the devastating blow of COVID-19, CFOs must look beyond managing costs to discovering new opportunities to plan business. CFOs can pursue these opportunities with the help of BI solutions.
Financial services are awash by terabytes of data pouring in each day. To manage a financial organization successfully, CFOs must understand that data quickly and in a targeted manner. Business Intelligence tools can draw data from internal and external sources for centralized and comprehensive data management and analysis.
A Business Intelligence (BI) tool will help CFOs infer the potential market and business opportunities, identify value drivers for growth opportunities, and then track KPIs against those. A well-implemented BI tool can assist CFOs in handling real-time data quickly and precisely. Business intelligence in finance enables CFOs to correlate between investments and profitability across multiple dimensions of your financial organization.
Such analysis will help CFOs further strategize on valuation or growth optimization. As a result of that solid proof, the finance organization can improve overall services and create future go-to-market strategies.
By focusing on strategic value through BI, CFOs can enable their organization to become resilient and agile. These traits are crucial now than ever before, given the need to mitigate risk while navigating potent disruptors like a global pandemic.
Read more: Business Intelligence in SAP: How It Helps You Become a Data-driven Organization
How BI Can Enhance The Role Of The CFO
Business Intelligence combines proactive data management with process automation and business analytics. By using this combination, CFOs can make several critical improvements within their organization, such as:
1. Clear and Complete Data
The CFO needs to know what is happening in the company to help him develop and implement refinements. BI tools can help CFO and his team to:
- Integrate and standardize existing software environment
- Eliminate human error
- Automate key processes that boost speed and accuracy
- Eliminate data silos
- Perform advanced data analysis tasks
The BI tools use ML to bring data together in a secure, well-managed data warehouse. These tools will clarify and organize your information, assisting CFOs to make the best decision possible. BI can benefit:
- Real-time working capital analysis and management
- Advanced budgeting and forecasting
- Preparation and distribution of critical financial statements
2. Data Visualization
CFOs need to make crucial decisions in real-time. However, looking through pie charts or reams of printouts can be time-consuming and delay the process of decision-making. Finance leaders can tackle this challenge easily with the help of business intelligence tools.
Read more: How Fingent Helps CFOs Gain New Insights and Reliably Enable Key Decisions
Business Intelligence uses data analytics to make insights available faster and with greater clarity. Hence, it can generate concise visualizations that bring additional value to the process. Such data visualizations help CFOs examine the connection of seemingly disparate data sets.
The CFO can use visualization to develop new products that will attract a key demographic and increase their average spend. Also, it will help them identify saving opportunities in the supply chain. BI uses advanced technologies to create heat maps, interactive augmented reality applications, and data dashboards. These will assist in tracking business performance and strategizing effectively to reduce the risk or increase profitability.
Read more: How Data Warehousing Adds Value To Data Visualization & Reporting
3. Risk Mitigation
The banking and finance sector faces unprecedented business disruptors creating uncertainty in business growth. With the help of BI tools, CFOs and their teams can organize all their data for real-time access and analysis.
Finance professionals can use these metrics to monitor and evaluate internal processes and detect and reduce fraudulent activities to minimize risk. This provides context and clarity and helps companies identify invoice fraud and improve internal compliance.
Business intelligence tools can be integrated with analytics capabilities to measure, identify, track, and analyze operations.
Read more: Transforming The CFO into a Business Value Creator and Role Model
4. Operation and Performance Management
Synchronizing the organization to build resilient operations has never been easy. The efficiency of management alone will not suffice. A well-known business benefit of BI tools is performance management capabilities. This will help you identify your business performance at every level. You can conduct a performance and operational health check regularly.
5. Identify Potential Weaknesses in Business
Growth will suffer if a business’s weakness goes undetected. A CFO and their team can identify incomplete or inconsistent data with the help of accurate and comprehensive data. This will reveal potential flaws in specific controls and processes.
6. Improved Customer Service and Retention
Finance organizations must understand why their customers might be inclined to move to the competition to stay ahead of the competition. BI tools reveal customer requirements because they identify the customers spending patterns. This data helps organizations to improvise and provide services that procure customer loyalty.
7. Predict Future Trends
A smart CFO will always have their gaze fixed on the future. Therefore, the CFO will want to explore and make predictions about future trends and prepare their finance organization with the future in mind. Instead of relying on old methods, CFOs can use BI tools to make predictions for the future of their organization and deliver clear plans that find sure success.
Read more: Reimagine Your Business Intelligence With Dynamic Visual Storytelling Using SAP Analytics Cloud
Make Better, Intelligent, Informed Decisions – Starting Now!
Equipped with valuable data, a CFO can make intelligent, informed decisions and help their financial organization stay ahead of the curve. They can also ensure that their organization remains resilient under disruptive circumstances. Thus, they can enable their business to maintain momentum with new developments, detect market changes, and measure the effect of changes on customer requirements. If you are a CFO, you need to get on board with the best way to maximize your Business Intelligence. Experts at Fingent can help you understand how. So give us a call, and let’s get talking.
How does legacy cloud migration ensure business continuity in FinTech? Explore in this article.
Did everyone have Business Continuity Plans in place and protocols to follow during the pandemic? Yes, definitely. Did anyone expect a disaster of magnitude like this? Not in their wildest dreams or gloomiest forecasts! The pandemic forced hundreds of millions of employees to shelter in place, essentially moving all operations online. Not all organizations were equipped with the needed technological tools, and most businesses were caught off-guard. FinTech companies were not immune to the aftermath.
For example, pre-COVID-19, it is true that a few FinTech organizations began migrating to Cloud. But, conversely, there were many who hesitated to embrace the cloud migration strategy because of legitimate concerns over critical factors such as rising costs, managing complex business data and workloads, re-training existing IT staff, and more.
The pandemic was a wake-up call that helped businesses identify legacy cloud migration as a relevant and vital choice. Though most companies have realized that modernizing old, outdated business applications can boost productivity and increase efficiency; some are still hesitant about their cloud migration strategy.
Read more: 11 Practices Followed by Leaders to Build Resilience and Ensure Rapid Business Recovery
This blog explains why FinTech organizations must consider legacy cloud migration seriously and what are some specific benefits of cloud migration strategy.
What is legacy cloud migration?
Legacy cloud migration involves moving on-premise applications, outdated software, or programs that a company has relied upon for years. These applications may include everything from sales or CRM applications to industry-specific applications. Some FinTech organizations may be reluctant to migrate to cloud just because legacy cloud migration is a daunting project. However, maintaining a status quo can be detrimental to your business growth.
Read more: Why modernize your legacy systems? What’s the best approach to legacy systems modernization?
Legacy cloud migration is the only light at the end of the tunnel
The pandemic has triggered a significant reexamination of FinTech businesses and their IT priorities. Gartner predicts that “by 2022 cloud shift across key enterprises IT markets will increase to 28%.” This era of economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic affected all businesses, especially, FinTech organizations. A report from Yellowbrick showed that 84.3% say cloud computing is more important than workplace disruption.
Thankfully, cloud migration strategy was available when it was most needed – a phase when maintaining business continuity has become a priority. Consider the most important reasons for legacy cloud migration.
Why FinTech Companies Should Embrace Legacy Cloud Migration
1. People matter more than premises
As the pandemic hit the world with one wave after another with no time to catch a breath, there was a dire need for remote self-service technology. The massive role played by people working from home is a clear indication that people matter more than premises. A year ago, cloud migration strategy was considered discretionary. Today, work from home has made cloud migration mandatory.
Read more: Why It’s Time to Embrace Cloud and Mobility Trends To Recession-Proof Your Business?
Hence, now is the time for FinTech organizations to plan for their business continuity to remain adept for future upheavals, disruptions, or even disasters. When your organization migrates to cloud, you ensure your teams’ effectiveness while working remotely.
2. Prepare for the next
Though the pandemic is wreaking havoc, it will recede in due time. However, what remains is a possibility of a similar recurrence of disruption in the future. Hence, FinTech organizations must prepare for future disruption by recognizing that the calamity to come may not be another pandemic but its functional equivalent. Legacy cloud migration will equip you to face any future disruptions and remain resilient.
3. Facilitate real-time payments
Banks are well aware of the advantages of real-time payments. The race is on for upgrades and integrations that allow organizations to leverage real-time payments. A survey of over 500 executives indicated that 71.9% are ‘extremely interested’ in such payment capabilities. Above all, cloud brings in scalability and agility to real-time payments. Cloud migration strategy can improve the speed and consistency of transactions. Besides, it can enable fast and frictionless transactions.
Legacy cloud migration allows banks to adopt digital payments. Banks can address many of their traditional payment pain points, such as spikes in demand.
Collaborating between payment players and cloud service providers can help your organization provide a more secure digital experience for your customers. This is of paramount importance in a world where contactless interaction is the key. According to a McKinsey survey, banks that adopt digital transformation were able to increase customer satisfaction by 15-20%, reduce cost by 20-40%, and boost conversion rates and growth by 20%.
While consumer expectations and payment preferences continue to evolve rapidly, cloud migration strategy will help FinTech industries to stay relevant and continue to grow.
Read more: Safeguarding IT Infrastructure From Cyber Attacks – Best Practices
4. Scalability and flexibility for an uncertain future
FinTech firms need an infrastructure that can grow with them and protect their business from future disruptions. Migrating to a cloud platform equips FinTech firms to adapt to branch closures while extending banking services to as many people as possible. Legacy cloud migration provides the agility to scale with speed while saving on on-premise infrastructure that is comparatively expensive to maintain and upgrade. Moreover, it can provide your organization the needed accessibility, flexibility, and scalability during economic downturns.
5. Manage risks and compliance
Efficiency, automation, and cloud-based delivery will be critical for compliance operations. It is vital to use next-generation technology and emerging digital approaches to optimize risk modeling. Since legacy cloud migration is agile, flexible, and low cost, it can solve many challenges in operational risk and financial crime compliance activities. Additionally, solutions deployed in the cloud can assist with operational challenges.
6. Data management
Acquiring large quantities of accurate data is a top priority for all FinTech firms. Their success depends on all the information they must collect, from onboarding to analyzing their spending habits. Cloud migration strategy enables your firm to gather and store data securely while allowing your designated employees to access it from anywhere when required.
Read more: Cloud Migration Strategy: 7 Steps to Accomplish a Flawless Transition
The FinTech industry is at a crossroads now. How it responds to the current crisis will determine its future. The key to the survival of FinTech companies will be the rapid digitization of their business and the adoption of cloud migration strategy. Migrating to the cloud is as important as the historic move from typewriter to computer. Cloud migration has become a global force for business growth. It can reduce overhead costs and help your team focus on increasing productivity and performance.
Cloud migration strategy will become inevitable as the FinTech industry builds a more accessible financial world. By partnering with a cloud migration services provider like Fingent, you will be able to quickly and seamlessly migrate to the cloud without disrupting your business. We also help you build FinTech applications and platforms leveraging the latest technology in the market. So, give us a call, and let’s get talking.
Smart Contracts to Streamline KYC: A Big Leap in FinTech
The advent of online transactions has brought in improved convenience, speed, and cost advantages across various aspects of our lives. KYC processes, online shopping, insurance premium payments, internet banking, and a host of financial functions have witnessed a drastic transformation with the adoption of FinTech solutions.
Read more: Technology in Finance: What to look out for in 2021?
However, these digital advancements have also taught us that a person’s online identity is not always what it appears to be. Identity theft, phishing schemes, and money laundering are just a few examples of digital scams that have wreaked havoc in the finance sector. Shockingly, a report by PwC stated that “in 2020, the average US organization experienced six incidents of fraud in the last 24 months and customer fraud ranks first among them.” The total loss suffered by the US companies from the frauds is close to $6.5B (over the past two years).
As many of us know, the KYC (know-your-customer) process was designed to eliminate the risk of customer fraud. Various companies use KYC to verify their customers’ credentials with the ultimate aim to confirm that they are not fraudulent or engaged in any criminal activity. However, KYC is a labor-intensive, repetitive process that is prone to human error. This blog explains how smart contracts for KYC can solve problems related to customer fraud and identity theft. Before that, let’s consider what smart contracts are and how they work.
What are smart contracts?
Most industries are eagerly adopting blockchain technology for smart contracts. According to Statista, “in 2021, global spending on blockchain solutions is projected to reach 6.6 billion dollars and is expected to reach 19 billion US dollars by 2024.”
Investopedia defines a smart contract as a self-executing contract that entails an agreement between the buyer and the seller. A smart contract encodes the agreement/ transaction between two parties and exists across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. Smart contracts eliminate the need for an external party or an intermediary to enforce the contract as defined. The decentralized blockchain network controls the execution of trusted transactions and agreements. All the transactions are trackable, irreversible, and impossible to manipulate because of the immutable audit trails created by blockchain.
In simple words, smart contracts are programs that run based on predetermined conditions. Participants engaged in a smart contract are sure about the outcome. The unique digital structure of a smart contract makes it super secure and resilient to any kind of data modification. What problems do smart contracts solve, though? Here are a few examples of real-world problems solved by smart contracts.
Read more: Leveraging Blockchain Technology to Transform Supply Chain Industry
How does a smart contract work?
A smart contract is a blockchain application. Just as a standard legal contract, a smart contract outlines the terms and conditions between two organizations. It works on a condition-based principle, that is: ‘if-when-then.’ Smart contracts allow you to define as many conditions or terms as you would require. Moreover, a smart contract enables both parties to interact in real-time, saving enormous time and resources. Additionally, it allows for anonymity, if needed.
How smart contracts assist banks and financial institutions to solve KYC-related problems?
1. Identity theft
Clients’ identity includes data on where they live, their passport number, driving license, security number, and so on. These data points are stored in centralized databases. If a criminal gets hold of one of these documents, they can exploit certain security flaws and steal your client’s identity. Cybercriminals can use your customer’s identity to gain some financial advantage or steal money. There have been occasions when a criminal successfully stole a deceased person’s identity to commit crimes.
Smart contracts on blockchain offer a novel solution that may include a comprehensive electronic signature service. It allows access to a private key and a public key. While a public key provides access to your public records, it offers concrete security as no one has access to change or edit your data. However, a private key allows you to give access to those required. This simple method helps prevent and restrict identity theft. Best-in-class data encryption technology ensures the highest levels of safety standards.
Read more: How Blockchain Enables the Insurance Industry to Tackle Data Challenges
2. Distributed user data collection
Smart contracts enable finance companies to uncomplicate the process of identity verification. It can make data available on a decentralized network. For example, claiming, verifying, and processing insurance has always been a labor-intensive task that frustrates your customers. Smart contracts offer a single source of truth, drastically reducing friction in the business process.
Here is how smart contracts simplify the process:
- Make data reconciliation easy
- Improve accuracy
- Minimize time spent in uncovering information
- Enhance improvements in speed and accuracy
- Improve customer experience
3. Automation and standardization of operations
Client data is collected daily. Name, address, and social security number are required for almost all transactions. Considering the recent progress achieved on KYC policy standardization, it is now possible to use smart contracts to control operations and execute agreements or transactions.
You can streamline the procedure across the industry by coding and standardizing the KYC workflow. It will minimize manual oversight and increase the effectiveness of the KYC system. It even allows you to implement multilingual solutions with the help of translation tools and smart contracts. Since smart contracts remove the need for a manual process for each document, decisions can be made quicker.
4. Comprehensive authentication process
It is crucial to verify the identity of individuals for data protection compliance and the prevention of fraud. A cryptographic verification solution is vital here. On the other hand, industries face another major challenge – allowing users to conduct online banking through apps. The glitch is that if a person loses her smart device, she exposes herself and the bank to a greater security risk.
Fortunately, the blockchain’s decentralized model almost eliminates the security risk by not allowing any edits on the data accessed by the thief or the fraudster. Once a smart contract on blockchain is formed, it remains immutable.
5. Communication and transparency
The smart contract will allow you to monitor everything from account openings to day-to-day transactions actively. Since the terms and conditions are pre-defined, it is recorded immediately, and remittance is raised automatically. This process avoids laborious approval workflows.
Since it allows for trust data to be stored on the KYC smart contract platform, banks or financial service providers can eliminate the secondary validation processes and cross-checking. Apart from this, when mistakes occur, they are quickly identified, reported, and solved. While transparency has to be dictated by the parties involved in traditional contracts, smart contracts always remain transparent. Such openness makes tracing transactions less cumbersome and could be traced right from the point of origin. Additionally, it automatically creates fully accessible history.
Read more: How AI and Machine Learning are Driving Cyber Security in FinTech?
6. Heightened security
KYC banking processes can go on for weeks, highly increasing the maintenance of regulatory compliance as the industry struggles to dodge financial fraudsters and terrorists. Fortunately, a shared ledger will help adjust and monitor the KYC process for all those involved. This would allow all parties to view any changes or updates made to the clients’ data. Such direct access would save on the time-intensive process of identifying suspicious activity and reporting it.
Read more: The New Untapped Opportunities for FinTech Companies in the Coming Years
Get smart with smart contracts!
As you can see, Smart Contracts are so much more than just an intelligent way of handling contracts. They are going to become the only way, and it’s time you get ahead of the competition by leveraging this technology. Talk to us and allow us to guide you through any questions you might have.
What comes under the scope of digital transformation? How does it differ from digitization and digitalization?
Digital Transformation vs. Digitization vs. Digitalization: Decoding the Concepts
The term digital transformation captivates every enterprise leader. Given the hype from software vendors and analysts, it’s hard to find an enterprise technology today that doesn’t self-endorse as a critical component of digital transformation.
While everyone seems to agree that digital transformation involves employing technology to accomplish business goals, there are differences of opinion among companies on what digital transformation is and isn’t. For a few, it means getting into e-commerce or moving into a cloud database. Some consider digital transformation as the adoption of advanced technologies like the Internet of Things or Artificial Intelligence to become more competitive.
Read more: Why Business Leaders Must Embrace Digital Adoption
With a lot of uncertainty prevailing on digital transformation’s scope and purpose, let’s take a closer look at what digital transformation means and not.
Digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation: Don’t confuse them
An excellent example of digitization is the conversion of paper-based forms and documents into electronic spreadsheets. Digitization enables businesses to cut costs to become more efficient. However, that’s the only competitive advantage it offers, either getting better or cheaper. Exactly what Microsoft Office did during its initial days by helping us compose and save documents easily.
With Big Data, Cloud Computing, and DevOps becoming ubiquitous, digitalization advanced businesses’ need to expand their online presence. A field service provider who never relied on software to run her company is now using an FSM suite to manage accounts, send invoices, create and schedule work orders, and generate reports. A digital strategy- such as a website or a mobile app- is inevitable for a business to stay connected with its customers in this digital world.
In addition to cost reduction and differentiation, digitization and digitalization are intended to simplify what a business does without drastic augmentation.
Digital transformation shifts the focus from the engineering mindset to the experience mindset. Peloton bike that offers an immersive cardio experience is a recent example of digital transformation. Peloton’s latest $2300 exercise bike streams customized workout content to its users through the large 22″ touch screen attached to it. Peloton applies user data tracking, engagement, and experience to replicate the studio-grade experience. This appeals to a vast customer base.
When most of the outdoor gyms were shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Peloton transformed the indoor exercise experience for their customers with personalized content streamed live as well as on-demand.
“Digital transformation can simply be defined as the application of new and emerging technologies to make fundamental changes to your business model.”
Read more: 4 Key Questions to Ask When Your Business Embarks on Digital Transformation
Digital transformation: Three areas of focus
“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change,” wrote Charles Darwin in 1809. For businesses, keeping up with the change is no longer an option but a condition. How can business leaders seize the opportunity and lead the change?
Read more: Fingent Speaks: What it Takes to Build a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy
1. Build and deliver customer-centric experiences
Digital transformation reimagines and redefines the customer experience. It isn’t easy to find a sector that is not disrupted by technology today.
Dairy farming, one of the most traditional industries that still follows farming practices passed down from generation to generation, is now embracing emerging technology to get smarter.
“Connected cows” – cows wearing pedometers and Fitbit-style necklaces to monitor feeding habits, acid monitors to detect digestive problems, and other cow-monitoring mechanisms to oversee milk production, smooth calving process, and ensure cattle health is an example of digital transformation in a traditional industry. The “connected cows” farming has led to greater crop yields and simplified the management of larger livestock herds.
Doesn’t emerging technology improve the farmer’s experience who first checks out her mobile or PC before heading to the stable in the morning?
2. Make the best of advanced technology
The early IT activities were focused on cutting costs and reducing human efforts by building relatively simple applications. With the growth and complexity of computing platforms and software applications, businesses have been showing the hunger to find the next big thing in technology that can enhance not just what they deliver but how they deliver. The ubiquitous digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Amazon’s Alexa can understand and recognize the context and enable businesses to improve customer interactions by not just being responsive but proactive.
Oncologists and pathologists use machine learning to discern patterns in symptoms to detect cancerous tissues or analyze bodily fluids. Mixed reality (MR) technology that breaks the barrier between physical and digital worlds is now getting mature enough to take digital data and place it in our actual environment. Ohio-based Case Western Reserve University uses Microsoft HoloLens devices to study human anatomy where an entire class can view the same life-sized 3D image at once. IoT applications that gather data continuously are programmed to improve the quality and productivity of life, society, and industries.
Robotic Process Automation, Blockchain, Augmented and Virtual realities, Artificial Intelligence- are all emerging technologies that enable digital transformation by enhancing customer experience. With numerous open-source libraries made available by tech providers like AWS, IBM Watson, Google Cloud, and various other vendors, it’s now possible for anyone to experiment and create POCs free of cost. The democratization of technology accelerates digital transformation.
Read more: Digital Transformation in Financial Services: All You Need to Know
3. Culture, organizational structure, and processes
“Transformation isn’t a plan or program; it’s a chain reaction of experiments,” says Joris Merks-Benjaminsen, Head of Digital Transformation at Google.
Fostering an environment of openness, business leaders can create a culture that allows ideas to flourish. Fluid structures, tools, and workplaces encourage employees to think outside the box and embrace change. Predictive models solely based on past experiences will only have a short-term impact. If you can offer more flexibility in the design and logic of a business case, people are more likely to invest their time, effort, and skills in things that matter for transformation.
Enterprise leaders can make way for transformation by:
- Supporting people focus on the future by establishing a stable long-term vision that includes well-defined challenges for them to work on.
- Implementing tools that facilitate cross-team collaboration and encouraging everyone to connect irrespective of hierarchy or position in the org chart.
- Adopting a “test and learn” approach, including “learning from mistakes” and rewarding experimentation. Small gestures of appreciation like awards and incentives inspire employees to practice acts of innovation.
Passionate leadership that cares about the customer and stimulates forward motion by encouraging entrepreneurship will successfully ride the transformation wave.
What digital transformation means today
Before Netflix, we used to scour shop racks in search of tapes, discs, and DVDs. Today, Netflix has transformed our content consumption experience by leveraging AI-driven content recommendations, live streaming, and endless libraries of digital content served upon our personal devices, topped with personalized suggestions, reviews, and attractive subscription options.
Digital transformation is not about how your business can sell more products to more people. It’s about making your customers spend more than they would otherwise. Rather than repositioning your brand as a seller of your products, you should aim at transforming to be a solution provider that helps solve your buyers’ woes and enhance their experience. If the first wave of transformation brought businesses online, the current wave of transformation requires businesses to innovate their selling process and offer new services and products that can solidify customer loyalty.
Need help with your digital transformation goals?
Fingent is setting up practices to actively leverage third-party developer innovation to reduce the time-to-market for our customers and us. One of our products, InfinCE, is empowering small businesses to achieve digital agility without the need to own infrastructure or an IT practice. ReachOut, another product, has digitized several field service businesses through automation of manual operations, digital inspection forms and checklists, and intelligent scheduling.
Fingent’s team is highly experienced in helping businesses solve their digital transformation challenges. We have partnered with businesses worldwide in their digital transformation projects. We can help you define your vision and create robust digital transformation plans that enable your business to transform and grow. To take advantage and get the ball rolling, please get in touch with Fingent.
Embedded finance, aka embedded banking, is transforming the financial services distribution model. E-commerce companies, Point-of-Sale systems, ride-sharing apps, food ordering apps, and other digital financial service providers consider it a revenue opportunity.
Is 2021 the Beginning of the Embedded Finance Era?
With over $7 trillion in revenue, embedded finance has generated a significant buzz in the FinTech market. Sadly, the financial services industry has not upgraded its core business model in years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made the need even stronger than before.
While banks and insurance companies have spent exorbitant amounts of money digitizing their existing processes, it is high time that they invest fully in creating digital business models to recover the economic crisis.
Read more: The New Untapped Opportunities for FinTech Companies in the Coming Years
Embedded finance helps businesses overcome digital adoption barriers and offer outstanding financial services to customers. While embedded finance will benefit the economy globally, its potential implication for the FinTech industry is massive.
Fingent’s FinTech application development services continuously provide financial service and technology innovations, valued by global financial services institutions.
What is Embedded Finance?
Embedded finance is the amalgamation of a non-financial service provider with a finance service. It allows enterprises to create new revenue streams and reinvent the services they offer their customers. It is beneficial to both the enterprises as well as users. In most cases, it is easier to buy products from one single source instead of interacting with many other businesses over the day.
FinTech is already growing at a significant rate, and the pandemic has caused more people to use day trading platforms from lending sites to stocks.
As the world will start incorporating FinTech in their lives, embedded finance opportunities will increase in the future.
What are the opportunities for Embedded Finance?
The most significant advantage of embedded finance is that it streamlines financial processes. Previously, there was a gap between a consumer and the service provider or seller. So, the consumer would often approach a lender or a bank to bridge the gap. However, with embedded finance, the need for a third-party bank or lender is eliminated. Here are a few examples to understand how embedded finance can help you.
Read more: FinTech Innovation: What Is In Store?
1. To make payments
For some consumers, paying with cash for a purchase hurts, making them reconsider a purchase. Embedded systems help eliminate this pain. A consumer using a mobile app with an embedded payment program can tap a few buttons and make a purchase instead of digging into their wallets for cash – for example, a ride-sharing app like Uber. So, when you book your ride, you don’t have to pay the driver cash or pull out your debit or credit card at the end. Instead, you complete the transaction in the app after you reach your destination. You can also use the embedded system to order your favorite cold brew or lip-smacking snack from Starbucks. The mobile app allows users to order and pay for their best-loved delicacies. Starbucks’ online ordering system also rewards customers with redeemable points for every purchase.
2. Lending
Before embedded finance, a person had to apply for a bank loan or open a credit card if he/she needed to borrow money. However, with an embedded system, a person can apply for and secure a loan at the time of purchase.
Klarna and AfterPay are examples of embedded lending. These programs split an online purchase into smaller monthly payments. For instance, a payment of $100 can be divided into four installments with $25 each.
Read more: FinTech: Safeguarding customer interest in the post-pandemic world
3. Insurance
The need to consult an insurance agent or broker for purchasing an insurance policy is eliminated with embedded insurance programs. In the past, buying insurance was needed to buy a car or a house. Also, it was a completely separate part of the process. Some companies have now found ways to speed things up and increase their bottom line by embedding the action of applying for an insurance policy into making a necessary purchase.
For example, Tesla offers an insurance program that allows people to purchase an appropriate amount of coverage almost instantly. Additionally, the insurance available directly from Tesla costs less than a policy from a third-party insurance provider.
4. Investment
Most people feel investing is a complicated process and prefer to stay out of it. However, embedded banking programs help simplify the investing program.
For example, Acorns is a program that invests your spare change by rounding up purchases, thus making investing seamless and touch-free. It doesn’t require you to manually pay back the money since the app takes care of that. They adjust their portfolio according to the market, and so you don’t have to pay attention to the values of mutual funds or stocks.
How can enterprises use embedded finance or banking in their products or services?
Organizations can embed finance or banking in several ways. Even companies that are not in the FinTech industry are seeking ways to offer financial services. For instance, Shopify is offering lending services and bank accounts to companies. Organizations like Udaan and Grab have also started financial services like Udaan Credit and GrabPay.
In some cases, companies can act as connectors between financial services and non-financial businesses. For example, organizations can use a data transfer network by Plaid to offer financial products.
Another option for companies is that they can work with businesses that embed the required infrastructure into their products or services. With an increasing number of transactions and payment processing, the platform ecosystems can expand quickly, giving rise to the need for external financial services.
Read more: Technology in Finance: What to look out for in 2021?
How is embedded finance beneficial to companies?
1. A new revenue system
Most customers show displeasure when redirected to multiple applications or experience a failed transaction due to timeout. The best resolution to this issue is to have a single unified flow in the customer journey. Customers would stay loyal to a brand if they have an easy-to-use eCommerce website.
Companies can charge a small fee as a commission on such transactions. It helps companies to have a new revenue opportunity without investing in bringing in new customers.
2. Increased hit rate/footfall
Embedded finance products can boost footfall if they can provide an overall improved experience. Given the cut-throat competition, customer loyalty can decline when a better product is launched in the market. Consumers will not hesitate to switch their allegiance to a competitor as long as they get what they need.
Companies can expect an increase in hit rate and better scope of converting users to potential customers with embedded finance products. If the transactions are smooth, the conversion rate will improve.
3. Use existing resources
Organizations need not worry about the expenses and resources needed to acquire new customers or procure high-level infrastructure. By including a financial angle to create an embedded product, you can modify the current systems.
4. Improved customer experience
Embedded finance helps companies create a unified journey for their customers. Offering more services to the customers will eliminate their need to deal with a third-party vendor for completing their transactions. It will result in higher profits. The direct connection between the customer and the company will help improve the customer experience significantly.
Read more: Digital Transformation in Financial Services: All You Need to Know
How will embedded finance change the future of the FinTech landscape?
With the evolving nature of technologies, embedded finance will persist due to its customizable nature. It will give rise to new opportunities and reduce the gap between various industries and their interactions.
Companies must be open to collaborating to build a bigger market, survive, and stay ahead of the competition. Software solutions providers and technology companies like Fingent play a crucial role in boosting the financial services landscape. Contact us to know more about our FinTech software development services and solutions.
What Is Next For Financial Technology Innovation?
User Experience is the King. The more demanding UX gets, the higher is the rate of fintech innovation. Until recent years, the FinTech industries had seen growth in mobile banking and increased technology investments. For instance, Mastercard is a rapidly evolving FinTech innovation, and its overall investment is estimated to be $16.6 billion.
In this regard, it is required that Governments take up a holistic approach to create business environments to enhance FinTechs. FinTech firms not only provide new market solutions but also increase the efficiency of the banking and financial industry verticals.
Regulatory Barriers For FinTech Innovation
Hedge funds, personal loan providers, and many other firms in the financial sector can be developed by preventing regulatory barriers that slow down FinTech innovation. In the recent past, the following were some of the potential barriers to the growth of FinTech innovation:
- Technology – For a company to be successful, it needs to know which technology would be beneficial for them. For instance, online trading provides people with access to their profile from their smartphones or computer systems. This is an example of a trial and error method in technology solutions that can be a potential barrier to some industries.
- Capital – Emerging markets need good investors. Top investors hesitate to invest in new markets. The market in which you operate is another key factor. There must be a streamlined system of funding to disrupt this barrier.
- Degree of Market Play – It is important to get a significant level of trust in the market in order to get close enough to banking institutions. Such high entry pressure is another potential barrier.
- Numerous Mobile Banking Services – There are multiple mobile banking applications on the rise that allow account management and other financial transactions online. This becomes difficult to choose between the lot.
- Increased Technology Investments – According to recent research on FinTech Global, the investments have doubled from $19.9 billion to $39.9 billion. FinTech attracts numerous investors who are interested to invest in the latest technology trends.
Related Reading: Check out the future of Artificial Intelligence in Investment Management.
FinTech Innovation: What’s In Store For The Future?
The future of FinTechs largely relies on technology breakthrough ideas. Let us look at the major drivers for FinTech Innovation:
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‘Regulatory Sandboxes’ To Understand Regulatory Boundaries
The idea of a ‘Regulatory sandbox’ was initiated back in 2015 in the UK. The purpose was to speed up the product development of FinTechs. The purpose also included establishing quick launch cycles. Companies allow testing of their solutions in a controlled environment. These regulatory sandboxes allow testing for a specific duration, say 6 months and is performed without the regular imposing of regulatory costs and difficult procedures immediately.
With this, the innovators can test their solutions and see the possible regulatory boundaries that evolve. This can also help firms make critical decisions on regulating new solutions and services in the future.
Some countries like the UK promote additional environments for sandboxes such as tax policies for creating business solutions, tax deductions, training, regulation, protection of rights to do business, etc.
Right Solution: Enabling FinTech innovations, need the solving of numerous challenges by market governments. FinTech can be supported directly. Early adoption of FinTech and incorporating policies, improving digital connectivity, implementing payment channels, etc., can be done to create a FinTech enhanced environment.
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Customer Service With Better Technology For Increased Value
Firms that provide global services require the help of technology to increase their efficiency and largely reach their customers. Financial establishments require a medium for easy communication with their customers to provide a better user experience.
Different industry verticals can look up to technology for operating with reduced costs and better business processes. This brings upon good prospects for FinTech innovations.
Right Solution: Providing good customer experience requires technology implementation. It can help streamline various business workflows and also increase business value.
The best solutions that can be leveraged from technology is as follows:
1. Artificial Intelligence: Customers need better UX. Businesses have realized that chatbots and other AI integration in their services increase value. In addition to reducing the workload of employees, optimizing expenses, managing resources, and many other huge benefits, it also gathers large volumes of data to provide critical insights for businesses to make important decisions.
2. Blockchain: To be able to record transactions without the intervention of a central authority is the power of most of the cryptocurrencies. FinTechs on Blockchain has been the most disruptive technologies in the financial industry verticals. Blockchain is the most suitable medium in which (AML) Anti-Money Laundering can be applied. Blockchain technology offers faster transactions, greater anonymity, and better data management.
3. BigData: There is no bigger tool than BigData that banks can leverage to provide a better service to customers. There is approx. 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated across the globe. FinTech companies can leverage BigData for use in customer segmentation, managing risks, detecting fraudsters, better compliance and by offering personalized services.
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Digitizing Industries For Increased Value
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FinTech Digital Revolution provides new innovations with the digital offering for financial services. Current technologies have proven to be very effective and powerful to safeguard transactions. Another benefit is that the transaction costs are considerably lower with the decentralization of blockchain which has made FinTechs reasonable.
Cryptocurrency along with the evolving FinTechs shape the whole economy by building layers of new business models.
According to the latest Statista reports, FinTech adoption rates were as huge as 69 percent back in 2017 which is 2018, the total investments touched $111.8 billion.
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Sharing Of Technical Know-How Among Various Industry Verticals
Financial Institutions and FinTechs can both benefit from sharing of technical knowledge. Financial service companies can scale and traditional banks can improve innovation and also reduce costs out of leveraging technology trends.
Related Reading: Increase efficiency and streamline workflow to improved customer service.
Traditional banks can leverage their huge data assets which in many cases remain unutilized. Data sharing can be performed with transparent terms that can help manage risks, provide enhanced customer service and provide cost-effectiveness. Banks thus obtain the chance of increasing revenue and FinTechs get access to a huge customer base.
There are many more strategies that FinTechs have to improve their customer base and operating efficiencies. To find out how many more aces FinTechs have up their sleeves, drop a call to our IT experts and strategists right away!
The impact of mobility goes much more than facilitating on-the-go online transactions. Mobility powered digital commerce has the potential to give a big boost to financial inclusion, throwing open banking facilities to people hitherto cut off from the same. At a macro level, it can propel growth, boosting the economy and the GDP of the country itself.
“Emerging economies,” such as India, Brazil, Philippines, and others are neither here nor there in terms of the economy. While such countries do have a strong banking system, generally the system is archaic in nature, with limited number of savings and credit products, and high fees. Moreover, a good chunk of the populace and small businesses, 1.6 billion people and 200 million micro, small and mid-size businesses to be precise, do not have access to such credit and savings products altogether. The mobile phone is a panacea to such woes, offering both the deprived and those already in the conventional banking system access to digital finance.
Digital payments and financial transactions, conducted through smartphones and other mobile devices are now a vital cog in the financial infrastructure of modern, developed economies such as the US and the Eurozone.
How Digital Finance Benefits
Digitization of financial transactions extends the traditional mobility benefits to finance, facilitating anywhere, anytime transactions, and flexibility in sending and receiving payments. It improves efficiency of the process, and offers a world of convenience as well. This apart, the widespread adoption and use of mobile phone powered digital finance is a win-win for everyone.
- Individuals and small businesses gain easy, wider, and often cheaper access to loans, over and above traditional and informal sources. McKinsey estimates an additional $2.1 trillion of loans would be available to individuals and small businesses, from current levels.
- Loan providers not just gain access to a whole new customer base, but also stand to save $400 billion a year in direct costs, considering digital accounts are 80% to 90% less expensive to service compared to traditional accounts. Overall, financial services providers could increase their balance sheets by an estimated $4.2 trillion.
- Digital finance can reduce leakages in collection of taxes, delivery of public services and transfer of subsidies. Governments gain a potential by $110 billion per year on these fronts.
- Service providers, such as telecommunications companies, payments providers, financial-technology start-ups, retailers, and others have a huge business opportunity on their hands. Even within banks and financial service providers, digital finance offers a new level playing field, giving everyone a more-or-less equal opportunity to establish dominance.
Consider the case of a farmer in rural India, who travels for kilometers and spends almost the whole day, just to make a utility payment. The same farmer gets paid just once or twice a year, during the time of crop harvest, but has no access to banks, to save the money. His business is highly risk-prone, at the mercy of monsoons or droughts, but he has no access to insurance. The smartphone can transform his life, by allowing him to accept payment in bank account, make utility payments in just a few minutes through the mobile wallet linked to the bank account, and likewise buy crop insurance on-the-fly.
Digital finance also allow small businesses integrate themselves to the formal mainstream economy, without being dependent on the local middleman. For instance, 70,000 small e-tailers from remote and desolate rural communities in China now sell on the Taobao marketplace, accepting payments digitally.
At a macro-level, digital financial inclusion has the potential to increase the GDPs of emerging economies by around 6%, or by $3.7 trillion, by 2025. This figure equals the size of Germany’s GDP. The resultant growth has the potential to employ 95 million people. The potential however varies from country to country, with countries such as India, Ethiopia and Nigeria having the potential to add as much as 10% to 12% to their GDP, whereas countries such as China, Brazil, and Mexico could add about 4% to 5% to their GDP.
The Long Road Ahead
Realization of such benefits was a long drawn out process in the developed countries, with digital finance maturing over time, in sync with the development of mobile internet infrastructure. Emerging economies can gain similar benefits while fulfilling the pressing need of financial inclusion, without going through similar efforts, since the mobile infrastructure is already in place in most parts of the world. About 80% of adults in emerging economies already have a mobile phone, whereas only 55% of them had a bank account, as on 2014.
However, there is still considerable ground to cover in most emerging economies before they can realize the full benefits of digital finance.
- Individuals may need to purchase a smartphone, or would need to upgrade their mobile phones. While this may sound obvious for the urban educated elite, it is still a tall ask for the rural poor, the primary targets of financial inclusion.
- Mobile service providers may need to roll out 3G and 4G networks over a wide area, before mobile powered digital finance can become widespread.
- Businesses would need to roll out digital financial products that offer better value and cost less than conventional financial tools and products. If they import digital financial products from the developed economies, they need to localize it as well, and ensure it meets local compliance regulations.
- Digital payments could unlock new finance and business models, such as peer-to-peer lending. There is a pressing need for regulatory innovation to facilitate such new models.
- There is also a need to change behavioral patterns and preferences, to make digital finance acceptable. NGOs or other agencies need to take the lead in educating the masses on smartphone usage and how to gain benefits from digital finance.
The onus is on the governments and stakeholder businesses to make a concerted and coordinated effort in such direction.
Efforts are already underway in several emerging economies to facilitate digital finance. For instance, in India, the “Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana” (PMJDY) aims to establish the backbone of digital payments initiative by opening bank accounts for all citizens.
However, much work still needs to be done. Financial and banking apps emerge as major conduits for digital finance transactions. Players who aim to grab a pie of the lucrative digital service market need to roll out intuitive apps that enable various possibilities and make digital transactions easy. It pays to partner with an established provider who have considerable experience in developing financial apps and software. We fit the bill perfectly on all counts, offering app and software solutions to enable your business gain new ground.