FINTECH FUNDING OUTLOOK

FOR THE PAST 15 years financial services have been an important component of PE/VC investments, constituting around 40 per cent of capital deployed

- Anuradha Ramachandran

Fintech has enjoyed a similar kind of importance for the last 10 years and has steadily increased its contribution to reach around eight to nine per cent of PE/VC investments over the last three years.

The first wave of fintech started with digital/ mobile wallets, moved to UPI/payments over the next few years and using the massive data trails created by the JAM (JanDhan, Aadhaar and Mobile penetration) trinity, digital lending became a large segment. With banks joining the mobile banking bandwagon, digital banking infrastructure became a large theme. Insurance and wealth management have also been a part of the fintech wave in recent times.

The last few years has seen the emergence of players of significant scale across segments like payments, MSME lending, consumer lending, wealth and insurance. Massive digital penetration has seen several of these segments adding millions of customers to the banking, wealth and insurance sectors.