Discerning The Impact of COVID-19 on Global and Indian FinTech
The past year has been an opportune time for FinTech players in the economy. While the FinTech industry is just evolving has already indicated its relevance and importance in the new abnormal economy. Let’s understand the impact of the major covid-19 outbreak on the FinTech companies.
BW Businessworld successfully conducted the Festival of FINTECH Conclave and Awards in association with BW Disrupt. Tania Ziegler, Lead of Global Benchmarking, Cambridge Centre of Alternative Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School joined as a keynote speaker shared her observations, study, data points, and her valuable insights through a presentation on the impact of COVID-19 on Global and Indian FinTech.
The research has been conducted by Cambridge Centre of Alternative Finance along with World Economic Forum and World Bank Group with the companies outspread across the globe as well as in India to understand the impact FinTech players during the massive disruption of Covid-19 where India represented the 3rd largest country in the study, with 142 operational firms, 83 primarily headquarters and 87% of them are retail facing FinTech.
Results of the research revealed that the top three verticals of FinTech across the globe were the same for India i.e. 39% Digital lending, 18% digital capital raising, and 17% digital payments. Discussing the growth rate and adoption of FinTech platforms among people; Ziegler states, “The higher the stringency of Covid-19 or lockdown the higher the adoption of financial technology.” The increased adoption is not necessarily caused by the pandemic but certainly, there is a correlation between the stricter lockdown and increased adoption of FinTech services.
Ziegler asserts “In India, we have seen a very big emphasis on MSMEs or supporting MSMEs as they go on their funding journey and in last 2 years there has been more emphasis on business-focused lending.” Adding more to it she said we also noticed that 50% of digital lending firms are also actively making changes to make that FinTech platform a lot easier for consumers to use accordingly.
Moving forward into the new digitized normal; people are expecting newer FinTech facilities available to them. The outcomes of the research certainly show the urgent need to innovate and increase the number of FinTech services serving the different demands of the users.
