Mumbai: The Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) organized 3rd edition of the FinTechX Conference, focusing on discussions around the FinTech Industry in India at large. Representatives from the sectors of Asset Management & Insurance, distribution, Cloud Adoption, payments, Blockchain, lending & digital onboarding attended the conference.
FinTechX is a conference, conceptualized to discuss the innovations and analyze the implications of technologies which are the reasons behind the paradigm shift in financial services. More than 400 attendees from various sectors like BFSI, IT and startups attended the conference.
Speaking on the role of FinTech in India & government of Maharashtra’s role in promoting it, Kaustubh Dhavse, Joint Secretary & officer on special duty to Chief Minister, Government of Maharashtra announced that Maharashtra has become the first state in the country to have a comprehensive FinTech policy. He further emphasised the progressive role of the government is doing the quality evaluation of new FinTech startups in AI, Blockchain and Machine Learning. He also announced about two initiatives taken by Maharashtra Government that is Maharashtra FinTech policy 2018 & Maharashtra FinTech Registry where all startups will be registering themselves to avail various incentives like the opportunity to represent them, online auctions, participating government policies. He further added, “As far as the road ahead is concerned, we envisage that in near future we will at least have 500 FinTech startups who are enabled, stable, have successful sizeable funding & are going to make India & Maharashtra proud”.
The conference has a discussion on FinTech intermediation for efficient distribution in micro Insurance & Investment. Speaking on the panel Upendra Namburi, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer, Bharti AXA General Insurance, pointed out three key challenges of microinsurance & investment, namely the cost of acquiring a client, availability and accessibility of data as well as ‘Experiential Selling’. Tina Singh, Chief Digital Officer, Mahindra Finance elaborated on challenges in rural & semi-urban areas related to microinsurance & investment in financial instruments like mutual funds, insurance etc.
Anup Bagchi, Executive Director of ICICI Bank addressed the delegates on the topic ‘From Competition to collaboration to…. What’s next in the Fintech Journey?’. His address focused on scaling up the FinTech industry as well as enhancing the skills of people. Speaking about the process of scaling up, he said “Customer wants the problem to be solved end to end. However, there are barriers, FinTech has to solve these barriers addressing both upstream & downstream issues while scaling up.”
Commenting on the current stage of Blockchain in 2018, Rohan Angrish, Head- ICICI Labs, ICICI Bank said “Blockchain’s journey from Proof of concept to mainstream is absolutely going to happen but the real question is to see whether Blockchain is able to do what couldn’t be done before. The answer to this question, in my opinion, is YES, it can.”
The conference also had discussions on current challenges in seamless & frictionless onboarding of customers, moving corporates & SME’s to e-KYC, and moving using lending for a true financial inclusion. The conference also discussed the rules of technology and regulations in the year 2022 and how FinTech sector can play a big role towards it.
