Changing Fintech Landscape And Customer Expectations The rise of fintech players, better user experience and innovative product solutions are acting as a catalyst that will further push digital adoption in India
By Ashish Goyal
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
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 accessible, 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 that will further push digital adoption in India. This will benefit both the industry and consumers in the forthcoming years.
Digital lenders are now more 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 such as open application programming interface (API), big data, and AI, the 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 a better experience in credit cards, cardless EMI, instant cash, personal loans, SMB loans, etc. As time progressed and more customers were acquired, players had to offer diversified products across customer needs.
For example, address a niche pain point to solve for consumers by providing microcredits in their bank accounts into multi-products, multi segments to serve our customers who need credit anytime; from buying skill upgrade courses, school fees, mobile, online purchases (infrequent purchases but relatively higher ticket size) or monthly purchases, cab payout, utilities (frequent purchases).
Customer experience in lending will change significantly and success in digital lending will enable lenders to offer a wide range of services to customers with highly customized products. It will be critical to establishing that all their financial needs will be met here, and they can rest assured. In nutshell, it can be defined as embedded finance and other services with the best in class user experience.
One needs to be clear about the customer segment, what need that segment has, and ensure that the customer does not need to think twice about whether his financial friend has that solution. Of course, delivering this kind of experience needs radical readiness in the thinking, processes, risk management, partnership management. The universal acceptance of the limits for consumers is extremely critical. The merchant networks will play a crucial part in this journey; 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 financial services easy, transparent, cost-effective and time-saving. Technological innovation is dramatically transforming the financial services industry and benefiting society. The customer experience and "meet all need" mindset will be crucial.
