Changing Fintech Landscape & Customer Expectations

With over a decade of experience in Management, Ashish is an exquisite expert in analyzing growth strategy as well as financial markets and has worked with Bajaj Allianz Group and managed AUM of Rs.350 billion.

Digital lending is emerging as a viable alternate for reaching those who have not been able to access financial services in the past. Innovative products are capable of overcoming geographical limitations, making the services accessable, reducing transaction costs, and enhancing transparency. The distinct market structures, regulatory mechanisms, and diverse customer needs have resulted in a huge variety of digital lending models, each dealing with financial inclusion in unique ways. The rise of fintech players, better user experience, and innovative product solutions are acting as a catalyst and will further push digital adoption in India.This will benefit both the industry and consumers in the forthcoming years.

Digital lenders are moreover focused on developing innovative products and catering to low income, semi urban, and rural customers in unorganized sectors at one end and providing best in class holistic experience to urban high end consumers. In this scenario, by adopting business and operational models which run on cutting edge technologies like open Application Programming Interface (API), Big Data and AI, financial landscape can seamlessly facilitate the launch, designing, implementation, and execution of customized products and services. This will offer consumers a wide range of

financial products at competitive prices and make financial institutions more efficient. In the past, fintech's main objective was to provide better experience in Credit cards, Cardless EMI, Instant cash, Personal loans, SMB loans, and many more. As time progressed and more customers were acquired, players had to offer diversified products across customer need.

For example, address a niche pain point to solve for consumer by providing micro credits in their bank accounts into multi products and multi segments to serve our customers who need credit anytime from buying skill upgrade course, school fees, mobile expenses, online purchase (infrequent purchases but relatively higher ticket size) or monthly purchases, cab payout, utilities (frequent purchases) and many more.

Customer experience in lending will change significantly and success in digital lending will enable lenders to offer wide range of services to customers with high customized products. It will be critical to establish that all their financial needs will be met here, and they can be rest assured. In nutshell, it can be defined as embedded finance and other services with best in class user experience. One needs to be clear about customer segment, what need that segment serves and ensure that the customer does not need to think twice, whether his financial friend has that solution. Of course, delivering this kind of experience needs radical readiness in the thinking, processes, risk management, and partnership management. The universal acceptance of the limits for consumer is extremely critical. The merchant networks will play a crucial part in this journey, that is highly intuitive, easy to understand interface where the customer can access all of these.

It is no exaggeration to say that fintech is literally transforming our lives and habits by making the financial services easy, transparent, cost effective, and time saving. Technological innovation is dramatically transforming the financial services industry and benefiting the society. The customer experience and 'meet all need' mindset will be crucial.