BFC Bulletins Monthly News Digest
Global Fintech Fest and Boston Consulting Group recently published a report on fintech trends and ideas. Here are 10 key report highlights:
- COVID-19 has been a deeply clarifying journey for fintechs with fiscal prudence, sustainable differentiation, high-quality governance and resilience all being key phrases now finding favor amongst fintechs.
- Fintechs are increasingly finding avenues to complement or collaborate with incumbents instead of acting as competitors.
- Data clearly shows that investment appetite in critical and emerging technologies can create long-term advances in financial services.
- Digital public infrastructure has been a significant innovation, allowing for long-term investments and standards to evolve through protocols as well as private innovation to take over and drive growth.
- For traditional financial institutions, working with fintechs is no longer optional. It is now a necessity that unlocks operating efficiency, customer convenience and employee experiences.
- It is absolutely critical to build much greater diversity in risk capital, possibly even by unlocking patient pools of capital through a special purpose sovereign wealth fund structure.
- We are entering a phase of sharp focus on profitability and self-funded growth. This is manifesting in the form of greater focus on sweating the asset and franchise that has already been built instead of running more experiments.
- Founders and boards should plan more sufficiently for IPOs.
- Investments in critical and emerging technologies (e.g. AI, cloud, quantum, blockchain, high-speed internet) can unleash innovation and productivity enhancement in ecosystems; however, the coming decade will most likely require 10 times more of such investments.
- The fintech ecosystem in India has evolved in a very unique and sophisticated manner, with three classes of players (service providers, core system providers and digital public infrastructure). Because all three have evolved in a large scale and complex ecosystem, they are quite robust and mature and are likely to cross borders to various economies as either protocols or software-as-a-service (SaaS).
