India is growing into a data-rich digital economy in financial services and insurance. And, this has opened tremendous opportunities for fast-growing ventures in the sector to build data models that translate into a strong foundation for growth. Discussing the emerging data structuring best practices in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector were leaders from fintech and insurtech companies at the Digital Pioneers Club CTO Roundtable series, hosted in association with Google Cloud. Present at the discussion were Sabyasachi Goswami, Chief Business Officer, Perfios Software Solutions; Rahul Bhargava, Chief Technology and Product Officer, InCred; Prajakt Deolasee, CTO, TurtleMint; Saurabh Arora, Co-founder, Plum Benefits and Mitesh Agarwal, Director, Customer Engineering, Google Cloud India.
A sector-wide digital transformation
The fact that Indians have shifted to carrying the mobile instead of the wallet or a debit or credit card is a strong indication of the transformation in consumer behaviour and digitisation of the sector, shared Perfios’ Sabyasachi. He noted that financial transactions and payments have undergone a massive transformation and that solutions like digilocker and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have had a positive impact on the sector. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data showed that UPI transactions stood at Rs 3.29 lakh crore in September with the number of transactions at 1.8 billion. Sabyasachi added that the sector is now moving towards a paperless economy and is in the right direction.
Echoing similar sentiments, but in the medical insurance space, Plum Benefits’s Saurabh highlighted the high acceptability of digital procurement of health insurance worth thousands of crores. “In the last one and a half years, about 1,000 corporates purchased health insurance with Plum and not even a single sale has taken place via in-person meeting. So this is the extent of digital transformation we are witnessing” he said.
Talking further about the transformation in the lending space, InCred’s Rahul added, “Money has become a digital product in India.” From a lending perspective, the digital acceleration has been more in digital documentation and consumer acceptance of the process. He explained, “The backend processes in lending, where you would have to get documents from a customer such as bank statements or proof of identity, have been simplified with different layers available on digital platforms such as IndiaStack. Now there is really no excuse for us to not have end-to-end digital lending practice.”
Prajakt shed light on how building foundational technologies has enabled expansion across two directions – one on enabling new ways to distribute insurance, two on enabling deeper penetration across insurance …….
Source: https://yourstory.com/2021/11/fintech-cxos-founders-data-structuring-bfsi-sector/amp