Fintech is a well blend of Finance and Technology. All over the world, many fintech start-ups are evolving. It’s a big industry with a good scope of growth and profit, but it is tough to survive in this fast-growing sector. There are various challenges that a fintech industry faces and some of them are described below.
Challenges Faced by Fintech Startups in India
• Regularity bodies
Red-tapism and the immense number of laws slow down the market, but strict regulations are inevitable when it comes to a financial or technological company. A Fintech faces a lot of challenge in coping with all these regulations that it has to comply with.
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• Cybersecurity
Fintech companies handle exceedingly sensitive information of the customers, and thus as the emerging leadership, you must be well prepared to fortify your organization against any challenge posed by the internet. The more the financial data of individuals and companies become available digitally, the higher is the risk of cyber security breaches.
• Accumulating capital
Fintech companies require huge capital, not only to pay off the salaries of the employees but also need funds for a secure infrastructure.
The first step of fund accumulation starts with a good sales pitch, and at times in spite of possessing excellent leadership skills, some falter here.
· Complex Industry
The complex working model of Fintech makes it a challenging task for them to maintain a healthy and smooth partnership with banks. Many fintech companies fear the loss of identity and autonomy amongst the vast landscape of large banking organizations.
On the other hand, banks find it risky to work with fintech innovators as they fear of losing reputation. These complex situations become the obstacles to the growth of fintech organizations.
· Lack of Consumer Trust
Providing financial services in the unbanked market is a challenge in itself due to the lack of trust of consumers, especially in India. People still relate these services with digital scams and are also not yet ready to accept the involvement of digital technology in financial services.
• Finding clients is a tough challenge
A business cannot run without customers and clients. Getting a client requires the support of a good platform. However, professional networking sites with a global reach, can provide the new leadership with the much-deserved podium and help you to take your business to newer heights.
With the advent of technology, the challenges faced by fintech start-ups has increased, but if the same technology can be utilized properly, it is a true blessing for any leadership.
Technology can be used to reach out to more people, and we all know, networking has a vital role in every endeavour. Evolvers networking site can rescue you by providing this networking platform that you might lack and help you to reach beyond your known limits to accomplish targets that might otherwise seem impossible.
Booming Startups in Fintech Industry
Today, everywhere and in every field like health tech, Logitech, Edtech, Traveltech, Enterprise, and Fintech, people use latest technologies and work by implementing the technologies in their business to get the best results. In India, still, there is a need for more technological strategies in the banking sector. Over 19% of the population still remains unbanked. Here Fintech startups come in.
Since 2015, the finance sector has undergone many changes like a change to move towards a cashless economy. The government is proactively using technologies to make India cashless – the launch of India stacking including UPI, digital wallets, e-KYC, Aadhaar, and BHIM are the Indian financial sector.
Demonetization is another factor that played an important role in the rise of the Fintech industry. According to the report of NASSCOM and KPMG, India has currently more than 500 startups in the Fintech industry, whose vision is to attain financial inclusion. In the ecosystem of startups, there are some wallets like FreeCharge, MobiKwik, and Paytym.
According to the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft-
“Digital technology provides a low-cost way for people in developing countries to send money to each other, buy and sell goods, borrow and save as long as the financial-regulation environment is supportive.” – Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
So, digital technologies play an important role to change the traditional business model in the digital business model.
Startups are working in various sub-sectors of Fintech such as mobile POS (mobile-based point of sale), in loans and insurances, and alternative leading among others.
Increased access to the internet, have helped efficient and automated financial services solutions. Well, it seems that the Fintech industry is a fast-growing industry and there are so many leading startups that are working very well and provides many financial solutions to the industry. Let us look towards some really innovative ones.
Fintech Startups in India
Faircent
Faircent is a lending startup that connects lenders with borrowers. It is a P2P model which means person to person. The startup was launched in 2014 and offers a variety of advanced tools such as Auto Invest. This is a type of tool with a great feature that matches criteria of lender’s investment with the requirements of borrower’s and automatically sends proposals to the borrower based on the amount, risk profile, and loan tenure.
The initial aim of this startup is to help people avail easy and fast personal loans at an affordable cost. This is one of the top startups that was also selected for the first batch of NASSCOM and was also a part of the BizSpark program and Microsoft Accelerator Winter Cohort.
With the help of latest technologies this emerging player from Fintech industry is working on to reach the larger group of professionals in this sector and looking for the businesses so they can tie up and can borrow online.
Simpl
This is an online payment instrument and was launched in 2015. The customers can purchase and settle their payments online. This is one of the fastest data-driven platforms that help to reduce the payment flow, improves client’s product experience, and gives a payment model to the user’s that is faster and more convenient than cards and wallets.
With the help of this, the customer can choose to pay one bill instead of making the payments individually. There are many merchants that currently work with Simpl including Nykaa, DocsApp, FreshMenu, BookMyShow, Faasos, Licious, Drivezy, Dunzo and others. The spending limit for customers is between $11.7 (INR 750) and $78 (INR 5,000). The startup also has a partnership with a number of NBFCs and banks to make a robust product portfolio.
Kissht
The startup was launched in 2015 and is a Mumbai-based startup that allows users to make purchases both offline and online. They provide instant credit and through this app users can buy items like jewelry, electronics, mobiles, laptops by opting EMIs even without a credit card.
This is the platform where you can see in-app merchants or choose whatever the customer wants to buy from the Kissht store. Users can also upload the documents and make the payment easily online. You can also see the limit of your credit and amount of upcoming EMIs. This is one of the top startups who also provide cash loans for construction of your loans, renovation of your homes, holidays, purchase of consumer durables, for traveling, short-term loan for equipment purchase and for other purposes.
The company has a fixed rate of interest on the monthly basis. Users can also pay their return amount in installments and can avail flexible return tenures of up to 60 months.
FTCash
The FTCash startup is founded in June 2015 and provides many excellent solutions for micro-merchants to accept the payments through many payment mediums like credit cards, debit cards, and mobile wallets.
In 2016, the FTCash startup was selected as one of the 12 finalists of IBM Smartcamp for Fintech Challenges and also was one of the six winners of iSPIRT-organised Great Tech Rocket ships Initiative 2016 (GTRS) and UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) India.
The startup also provides short-term loans to the merchants and empowers SME’s and Merchants by offering easy access to credit usually range from $1000 to $20,000, with interest rates somewhere between 18 and 30%.
EarlySalary
This is a Pune-based startup and first mobile lending platform which is founded in 2015 by Ashish Goyal and AkshayMehrotra. It provides smart risk scoring system instant cash loans, and salary advances. The startup has their operations in various cities including Hyderabad, New Delhi, Jaipur, Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, among others. This is the startup that provides advance salary up to 50% of monthly salary to its users and 70% of the loans are given in 10 minutes. The startup has also made the partnership with SMEs and with other corporate for advance salary purposes.
The average size of the loan that the company provides is between $125-$1,500 (INR 8,000 to INR 1 Lakh) for a period of up to 30 days. The app has many subscribers for both Android and IOS mobile app platforms.
Today, with the help of experienced, professional team, and funding from investors like IDG Ventures India, IFMR Capital, the Fintech startup wants to expand the entire business and work across tier II and tier III cities in the country.
Rubique
Rubique is one of the leading Fintech startups that launched in 2014. The startup is an online marketplace for all type of financial products that offers loan products and end-to-end loan fulfillments to MSMEs and to individuals.
With the help of new online business marketing strategies and unique algorithm, this online platform facilitates up to 235+ products such as home loans, car loans, credit cards, business loans, loans against property, personal loans, healthcare loans, education loans, construction equipment financing, among others.
The startup is trying to fill the gap between lenders and borrowers with the help of various financing options and it has two verticals. First, the startup provides curated, well-aggregated, and digitized collection of products to the users. Second, the user can apply online after comparing and selecting the products.
The startup has also a credit score- Rubique’s Magic Store- that can be developed with the bank’s lending system. This is the startup in Fintech industry who has clocked revenue of over $2.6 Mn (INR 17.5 Cr) in just three years.
MoneyTap
MoneyTap is a Bengaluru-based consumer lending startup and India’s first app-based credit line. It also provides flexible loans for personal use. By targeting the country’s fast-growing middle-income group, the team of MoneyTap solves the problems of insufficient consumer credit line and of the people who need money for rent, weddings, paying school fees, shopping, sending money to family and so on.
This is the only platform where users can borrow anywhere between $50-$7,500 (INR 3,000 to INR 5 Lakh) and offers the repayment time of two months up to three years. The app has more than 300k registered users across 14 cities in India. Recently, the startup is working with seven NBFC/Banking partners including RBL Bank at different stages of integration.
MoneyTap app charged over a 1.5% interest rate. In recent times, the consumer has become more demanding with the demanding consumer internet companies. So, this is one of the booming Fintech startups.
Innoviti
This startup is started by IIT Bombay alumnus Rajeev Aggarwal, as the manufacturers of wireless hardware systems manufacturers in 2002. The advanced solutions of this startup help businesses to reduce the cost of processing digital payments. It supplies hassle-free working strategies that help in the growth of other small businesses.
The payment platform of Innoviti includes Indigo, Walmart, Titan, Reliance, Reliance Retail, and several others. Banks like ICICI, Axis, and HDFC also uses this platform to access customers for loan distribution.
The company’s aim is to focus on building and implementing new technologies that give reliability, speed, and flexibility.
So, these all are the booming startups of Fintech Industry and achieved their goal by a lot of hard work and dedication.
Now, in the next article, we will take a look at the booming startups of the Education industry.