Fintechs use power of Cloud to survive Covid disruption, expand reach

From reaching newer geographies in the hinterland, to building entire virtual contact centres, these enterprises are reinventing and thriving in the times of the pandemic

The ongoing pandemic caused huge disruption in several sectors and fintech is clearly among those. Owing to a shift in consumer behaviour and business requirements, many fintech firms operating out of India came out with innovations apart from quickly moving to the Cloud to expand their playing field and improve efficiency. 

One such firm is Easy Pay, which pivoted quickly to build and scale a solution to address underserved consumer segments in rural India during this pandemic. It has built a fintech application called ‘Paisa Nikal’ to provide people in rural areas a simple digital approach to meet daily financial transactions, cash withdrawals and deposits, with the help of kiranas or local shops. This has helped to address the challenges of inadequate ATM and branch banking availability in towns and villages. It also moved to AWS Cloud from data centre which reduced the processing time that the app take when hosted at the latter from over 35 seconds to just five seconds. 

Now more than 15 million people have used Paisa Nikal for convenient banking services since the start of the lockdown in India early this year. Over Rs 1,400 crore of cash withdrawals have happened through the app during this period. The number of transactions on the app has increased more than 20x since the start of the lockdown. About 85 per cent of transactions on the app are attributed to cash withdrawals. 

Another fintech firm Gain Credit built an entire virtual contact centre using Amazon Connect, a cloud customer contact centre service of AWS after it had to shut down its contact centre operations in Gurugram owing to the lockdown resulting in complete blackout almost seven days. Within a week, Gain Credit restored 40 per cent of its incoming interactions from customers. To accelerate its ability to address customer queries, Amazon Lex, a machine learning service for building conversational interfaces, enabled Gain Credit to build and integrate chatbot and voicebot to its website.

At present, the bots built by Gain Credit handles close to 75 per cent of incoming customer queries, while the remaining are serviced by customer service agents. This has also helped the firm to roll out more product releases over a shorter time period. 

There are about 5,000 fintech (start-ups) across the APJ (Asia Pacific & Japan region), says Navdeep Manaktala, head of start-up business for APJ at AWS, of which around 3,000 are based out of India. Last year, these firms across the APJ region attracted around $5 billion in funding out of which over 50 per cent came to India. “So, India is clearly at the forefront of the fintech revolution,” he said. 

Amazon is looking at going deeper into the Indian financial services market, whose size could touch around $340 billion in the next few years. The company is looking at helping these firms to quickly build and launch products and services leveraging its cloud platforms.

Take the example of WorkApps, a fintech firm that provides messaging platform for banking, NBFCs, insurance, securities, mutual funds and payment wallets. The start-up is now providing video KYC (know your customer) service, using Amazon Rekognition, a deep learning image analysis service for fast and accurate face matching and verifying identity. 

WorkApps Video KYC platform is now being implemented by multiple banks and fintech firms in India for opening savings accounts, fixed deposits, applying for credit cards, and personal and consumer durable loans.