Fintech Start-Ups Are Growing: What's New To Look For In 2020 India's adoption of fintech has led the charts along with China

Fintech in India has grown exponentially in the last five years, especially due to innovations by financial institutions, startups and new policies by the government for the industry. Banks and regulators have been revisiting operating models and policies to build more collaborations and increase participation.

India's adoption of fintech has led the charts along with China and has around 2,000 fintech start-ups by 2019. The government of India has played a key role by starting the Digital India programme, wherein the country is looking at digitalizing every offline cash transaction through Unified Payment Interface, e-commerce or point-of-sale systems.

India has built a wide path for fintech for the coming years to move to the next growth phase with regulations paving development schemes for start-ups. Financial institutions such as Mastercard have come forward to initiate programme by the name "Team Cashless India". This campaign will encourage and help merchants to go digital and accept digital payments. Mastercard will work together with Confederation of All India Traders, acquirer banks and fintech companies to support merchants to deploy digital payments acceptance infrastructure.

The Reserve Bank of India has announced to propose Acceptance Development Fund to pay for digital payment acceptance. This is one of the measures to boost digital payment in India. Digital payments in tier III and tier IV towns are expected to rise with the help of such funding. This proposal aims to ensure that SME's, kirana stores, health centres and utility centres in rural areas are 100% digital. Such schemes will surely encourage more and more fintech companies to build platforms to ease digital transactions and quick adoptions by merchants and consumers. Along with other financial institutions, India has to launch a campaign that will educate end-users on the benefits of making digital payments and urge them to adopt security and safety best practices. The IT ministry and Google India has also collaborated for a nationwide awareness campaign "Digital Payment Abhiyan'. To drive the campaign objectives and strengthen reach to users across all states, DSCI has on-boarded various digital payments and ecosystem partners. These partners include representation from banking, card networks as well as the fintech segment.

As per a NASSCOM report, things will continue to look up with Indian fintech market potentially touching $2.4 billion by 2020. India already is a seamless digital payment country with QR code payments provided by players such as Paytm, PhonePe, ePaisa, Google Pay and many more. But to keep the pace, fintech start-ups need to specialise in these four key sectors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

While it is known how the fintech sector is disrupting the Indian market, but now with AI as partner, it is aiming to change the entire scenario.

Intelligent Automation

The combination of AI and RPA is called intelligent automation. It is the next big advancement in the way businesses are getting their work done effortlessly. Intelligent automation has garnered interest among from the financial sector. Also, a recent report by Capgemini's Digital Transformation Institute shows that by 2020, the financial services industry could reap up to $512 billion in new global revenues through intelligent automation.

Blockchain

The fintech industry's growth has been bolstered by blockchain with firms using this technology to enhance their stack. According to PWC's study of financial services and fintech, about 77 per cent of the financial services industry is planning to adopt blockchain by 2020.

Machine Learning (ML)

ML has moved from the edge to the centre of the technology boom especially helping the fintech sector to forecast financial trends. Many fintechs today have moved from using traditional predictive analysis to using ML algorithms to identify market changes much earlier compared with traditional methods.