Vanakkam! Śubhēcchā’ō! Namaste! – The language paradigm in India’s financial inclusion journey.
With every nook and corner of India embracing the digital way of banking, further catalyzed by a raging pandemic, an interesting fact emerges. A 2019 November survey by the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IMAI) and Nielsen reveals that, for the first time, rural India now has more Internet users than urban India. Although…
Continue ReadingOCEN and digital lending: a revolution waiting on the anvil
The newest kid on the block of digital lending and financing is the OCEN, or the Open Credit Enablement Network. Announced by Nandan Nilekani, cfounding architect of Aadhaar and co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys, this is the newest initiative to help bring credit to the ones who need it the most. OCEN promises the…
Continue ReadingWill OCEN be the UPI of lending?
The problem of universal access to credit seems elusive. The issues are all too familiar. Traditional players like banks and NBFCs still rely on old world methodologies (balance-sheets, collateral) with largely ‘one-size-fits-all’ credit products. These products follow a bank-centric design, and not a borrower-centric design. The fallouts are huge, as this traditional approach results in…
Continue ReadingIndia’s Neobanks
The world of FinTech was already undergoing a transformation, even before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The unprecedented lockdown situation only precipitated the transformation. The digital revolution so far has enabled large scale integrations through APIs to enable a range of services to the customer, be it food ordering, ecommerce, or investments. Though the adoption for…
Continue ReadingMillennials and finance
Defining a generation is neither easy, nor universal. The millennial generation, the cohort at the helm of the workforce right now, is still difficult to outline. The millennial generation covers those born between 1982 and 1996. Today’s millennial will be the last generation to remember a time when India was a socialist state, when the…
Continue ReadingThe API ecosystem
From being obscure technical components to helping create a whole ecosystem that is at the heart of nearly all commerce and business today, APIs have come a long way. We inhabit an app-dependent world, and those apps in turn depend on APIs – application programming interfaces. APIs are the magic glue that connects to integrate…
Continue ReadingTogether is better: When banks meet fintechs
When the global economic crisis happened in 2008, there was a sustained narrative of how disruptive and innovative FinTech companies would soon render established banks obsolete. While there has been an undeniable bloom of a variety of extraordinary startups that added tremendous value to the world, the larger picture has been that the old behemoths…
Continue ReadingData privacy in the financial sector
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Edward Snowden In the early twentieth century, oil was the world’s most valuable resource. It powered machines, cars, homes. Oil—petrol, diesel… powered…
Continue ReadingTransforming digital lending through APIs
Platformable, a consulting firm that helps companies and public bodies generate value through the use of APIs, recently published stats on the status of Open Banking which gives interesting insights especially on regional variations as also the products in favour. Two facts stand out- growth in the European region (29%) was driven by the mandate…
Continue ReadingRole of AI in lending
“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” ― EliezerYudkowsky Artificial intelligence is when a machine can think. It is that simple—when a machine is able to take in data, interpret and learn from it the way humans do, it is an artificially intelligent machine. AI…
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