The COVID19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation journey of organisations. Most of them had to adapt to it earlier than they actually planned which eventually led to some difficulties.
The pandemic forced various industries to embrace innovation and opened up a realm of amazing possibilities. Today, it is up to us, whether to leverage them and embrace the new flexible open mindset or not. Being an observer is no longer an option, and just like we all joined forces in a fight against the virus, we need to join forces and work on building a new future for businesses together. And where better to start, then with the backbone of any system- Finance.
According to a report in The Paypers titled ‘Digital transformation: the fintech fuel of tomorrow’ studies have shown, that customers seek change in 5 criteria, when it comes to fintech solutions – transparency, availability, cost, convenience, and trust.
To remain competitive in the ever-changing world of tomorrow, financial institutions have to accept the fact that things like mobile payments and automatic onboarding, should be laying out the foundation for their stable future, and ignoring them, would lead to a substantial loss of market share.
Digitalisation is another big trend that has been gaining momentum and that will continue dominating the future of fintech. Providing online access to services, automatic onboarding, credit card issuance, online AML / KYC checks are all important components of what lies ahead for the industry. After all, this is how fintech appeared in the first place it was born from the need to solve challenges and digitalise procedures that no one dared to do before.
Growth of Fintech
According to a recent report in Moneycontrol, the life insurance industry saw a strong growth in the month of August. Prashant Tripathy, MD & CEO of Max Life Insurance told Moneycontrol that digitisation in the company is being done in a comprehensive manner, looking at vertical as well as horizontals.
“The elements of prospecting, onboarding and customer service are going through transformational changes,” said Tripathy.
He further added that across all channels, 100 percent policies come to us digitally. It gets underwritten through AI/ML-based solutions, which immediately make the decision and that process has been 100 percent digitised.
“We have about 85 percent of customer queries coming to us through digital means and getting responded digitally. All the recruitment, and we are a big recruiter of agent-advisors, happens digitally,” Tripathy explained.
The effort is to be a comprehensive digital organisation. We have now two rounds of accelerator programmes, where we ask fintech companies to solve some of our problems, which could be related to onboarding, underwriting, analytics, customer service, etc. This helps our team also to learn and continuously evolve.
Digital is a big play for Max Life and currently, it is on a multi-year programme to completely digitise its operations.
The fintech industry has been relying on the latest technologies for improving customer experience, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the holy grail of every organisation, as it tries to better understand its customer. This is especially the case post COVID-19, as user behaviour has undergone a change and is continuing to evolve. Businesses, especially financial institutions are going through the most interesting transformation seen in recent times. This has been powered by AI, amongst other technologies.
Leveraging AI
Financial institutions across the world are also figuring out ways in which they can leverage Artificial Intelligence. The sector has been fortunate thanks to the regulatory onslaught post the 2008 economic crisis, as a result of which banks are well equipped to weather the COVID-19 storm as well as aid economic recovery
Artificial Intelligence is used in many Fintech solutions. It’s a cure for the daily challenges faced by many businesses like customer experience personalization and loyalty building, to strictly technical financial features such as anomaly detection or fraud prevention.
If we look at the fintech landscape of tomorrow, we can already highlight a number of trends that will be shaping the future of the industry.
The report further explained that the customer centric and mobile first approaches will be the leading directions financial solutions would need to work on. Faced with restrictions, users realised the need for fast services and instant procedures, and fintech companies lead the way by supporting various service applications in their goal to provide a seamless customer experience. We can see a lot of potential for such mutual integrations moving onwards and a number of ways that such collaborations could support companies most affected by the pandemic today – for example, moving lending to a digital environment with simple and transparent tools could provide SMEs, who have lost their usual access to financial flows, with tools to obtain it.
In a conversation with W.Media, A Shiju Rawther, Head- Information Technology, SBI Mutual Fund outlined his views on usage of AI in the BFSI sector.
“The BFSI industry has always seemed to be one of the most developed and willing to invest in new technologies. It’s no wonder that AI has quickly become one of the technical pillars on which the entire modern financial market is built,” said Rawther.
He further explained that not everyone is aware that AI is not only leading analytical solution, but also a way to change the way customers interact with services provided by the financial industry. Let’s take a closer look at this extraordinary relationship, its impact on the way we use banks, and on issues such as fraud detection and compliance regulations.
