According to a research issued last week by the Robocash Group, India ranked as the top nation in a fintech study of nine South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.
Robocash is a fintech firm with operations in Asia and Europe that specializes in offering technology financial solutions to those in emerging nations who are underserved by the traditional banking system.
India was also named the top country in the Robocash Southeast Asia Fintech Index. The Index calculates scores based on three metrics: share of total funding, share of total revenue, and share of total active enterprises. Singapore came in second, with Indonesia coming in third.
The poll focused on four fintech sectors: payments and transfers, alternative lending, e-wallets, and digital banking. For the purposes of the study, only firms based on the territory of a certain country were chosen, whereas overseas entities were excluded.
India has the most, with 541, accounting for 43.1 percent of the total, followed by Indonesia 165 (13.2 percent), Singapore 162 (12.9 percent), the Philippines 125 (10 percent), Malaysia 84 (6.7 percent), and Vietnam 78. (6.2 per cent). With 51, 27 and 21 firms, respectively, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh have the fewest fintech startups among the nations studied.
As a result, it is not unexpected that Alternative Lending, which encompasses services such as online microcredit, peer-to-peer lending, and point-of-sale financing (for example, installment loans for customers at checkout), grew the fastest of the four sectors between 2000 and 2022.
Robocash pointed out that the four industries investigated are by no means the region’s biggest fintech industry. Although they account for 54.3 percent of all fintech businesses in the Philippines, the other countries in the survey have more diverse fintech sectors, with these four sectors accounting for only 19.4 percent of all fintech companies in Indonesia and only 10.5 percent in India, which has 5,176 fintech firms, according to the Robocash report.
India got USD 25.6 billion (48% of total funding), followed by Singapore with USD 14.7 billion (27%), Indonesia with USD 7.5 billion (14.1%), the Philippines with USD 2.4 billion (3.4%), and Vietnam with USD 1.8 billion (3.4 per cent).
Hemant Gala, Head of Financial Services & Banking at PhonePe, an Indian digital payment powerhouse, was cited in 2021 as stating, “Digital payments have become a way of life in India, with 10-15 million new users joining the digital bandwagon in the previous year. Demonetisation and the Covid-19 epidemic were two elements that contributed to this shift.”
According to the survey, digital lending, InsurTech, and WealthTech are among the subsectors that would see the most growth, owing to increased customization of segment-specific solutions, expanding awareness and simplicity of policy buying and claims procedures, and brisk demand for investment solutions.