Want to Save Data in Encrypted Format?
With its recent partnership with IRCTC to offer a quick and completely frictionless payment experience for ticket bookings ePayLater is India’s first of its kind “Buy Now Pay Later” checkout service. The Mumbai-based Fintech company leverages the power of data to mitigate the challenges being faced by online shoppers and the e-commerce industry today.
Founded in 2015, the company had raised USD 2 Mn in its first round of funding. Now the company claims to be already on an enviable growth trajectory with volumes going up by 200% QoQ. With its success in the online payment space ePayLater has plans to expand into the offline space as well in the days to come. The founder of Epaylater - Akshat Saxena and Product Head - Atishay Kumar predict 2017 as the year for Fintech and why?
“Yes, it definitely is going to be. We believe following are the major drivers for it”:
Business need: There is a scope of innovation across length and breadth of banking services, as newer technologies emerge and customers get more demanding. Further, the contours of banking as we know it are blurring as alternate models enter the fray. For example, Telcos with Payment Bank license, small banks, wallet companies et al.
Venture funding: Investment sentiment in the investor community seems to be upbeat as the sector is attracting significant investment. This could turbo boost the Fintech momentum this year and beyond.
Government support: Various government initiatives towards promoting digitisation of payments and e-banking in general have created a bigger market for the FinTech products.
Credit lending is the next big wave of Indian fintech. It will assume the centrestage. India has had a highly under-penetrated market for credit products owing to a variety of factors - limited risk assessment systems/methods, regulatory restrictions to name a few. Since a good number of them have been alleviated thanks to advancements in technology, centralization of credit information (Bureaus), ease of verification (through UID, NSDL etc), few of the bottlenecks have been removed and this should create a multiplier effect on the sector’s growth.
Data theft is real. It is very important to make sure data is safe from external and internal threats. Safety becomes supremely important when you are dealing with sensitive customer information. It is easy to think of data safety as just a requirement for doing business online, but there is another angle which is customer trust. A customer places immense trust in a company when he or she shares vital information in exchange of services and it is important for a company to honor the trust placed in them.
Companies should save their data securely and in encrypted format. On top of it, all the entry points to the company servers must be analyzed for security weakness and the weaknesses should be fixed as soon as they are found. Companies should work with crowdsourced bug detection platforms like hackerone that can help do vulnerability detection for you quickly and without hiring expensive resources. It often happens that security gets compromised in a rush to release features to customers and it is important for senior leadership to understand the importance of data security and exercise caution to not circumvent security by allocating time and resources to handle this important aspect of software development.
