Fintech Reshaping India's Financial Landscape

Research reveals constantly changing and sophisticated avenues of attack targeting the banking and finance industry even as fintech startups change the way we bank.

- Rajesh Maurya

Fintech is starting to fill some of the traditional roles played by banks, and new mobile banking and payment technologies are making it easier to improve customer experience. The emergence of fintech startups and new disruptive technologies are changing how banking is being done and the way financial services are being delivered.

Spurred by competition from such startups— who are introducing new consumer initiatives such as peer-to-peer and marketplace lending and crowd funding—banks are increasingly turning to technology to improve their processes and business models in order to redefine customer experience.

As digital (and mobile) transactions become commonplace, banks moving to embrace and enable the new digital economy will inevitably face increased security and data risks. They are likely to face new strains of malware and innovative phishing attacks aimed at exploiting loopholes as they start to share more customer data between branches, mobile users, and even through the cloud.

According to a recent FortiGuard Labs Threat Landscape Report, threat activity in India showed a significant increase over the last two weeks of December 2016 when the country witnessed an increase in digital transactions post demonetisation. Interestingly, this surge was not seen globally, and the most targeted industry was banking and finance which received 15 times more hits than the second-placed IT industry.

The number of cyber frauds involving financial transactions in India increased by about 25% to 16,468 cases in 2015-16 from a year ago as per the data made available by RBI.

With technology being the core of transformation, financial institutions simply must dedicate more resources to improve both security capabilities and awareness. While the below list is not exhaustive, they comprise the key challenges we expect financial services sector CIOs to face in 2017.