Fintech leaders feel unavailability of ecosystem could delay digital push

He said that the “backend wasn’t ready” in India yet to go completely digital. Jha was speaking at the CII Fintech 2017 conclave here last week.

Adhil Shetty, chief executive officer (CEO) of BankBazaar.com, an online platform to compare various financial services, voiced similar concerns, saying that customers want to go digital and paperless but the means remain a question.

“People want everything on their mobile phone. They realise that as long as it is trustworthy, dependable and secure, they are willing to interact with the platform… People want everything in seconds,” Shetty.

“I believe the ecosystem exists… customers are demanding it. The question is when will the mass market move,” he said.

Bharat Anand, chief of technology, NATGRID, said that it was important to create trust among the customers to make them go completely digital.

“People want to be sure who they are providing information to,” said Anand, adding that digitisation can be promoted only with trust itself. “It has to go hand in hand… it has to be evolved”.

“The idea is to reach end customer and remove intermediaries,” he said. “We need to bring technology as last mile connectivity to build that trust”.

“It’s a paradox. As a customer, I want highest security for my money but I want it really easy to be used,” said Sriram Jagannathan, vice president, Amazon Payments, an online payment process of making payments routed through one’s account on Amazon.

Jha said that India needs to develop system that can bring a “behavioral change” among people, making them comfortable with digital platforms.

“What this country needs to think is that fintech is the real enabler for the next generation, country and economy,” said Prem Chand, executive vice chairman, MitKat Advisory, management consultancy firm.

“We should develop our own platforms,” he said.