Fintech startups changing rural India’s post-pandemic landscape: the story

There has been a significant shift towards placing more emphasis on rural development after the pandemic. To alleviate distress and improve employment and other opportunities for rural residents to earn a living, the Ministry of Rural Development has implemented a number of new policies.

Apart from that, there are many platforms, especially fintech companies, that are actively changing the landscape of rural India. These platforms do things like provide funding to small businesses and determine the business landscape, create digital awareness and encourage people to transact online and provide job opportunities through training.

Below is a list of FinTech startups that are contributing significantly to the ecosystem and should not be overlooked.

1. Biz2X: Biz2X is a SaaS platform that enables financial institutions to offer a customized online lending experience for their small and medium business customers. Biz2X helps banks streamline their lending processes, including authentication and paperwork, by offering proprietary technology that helps make quick credit decisions and disburse loans in days, instead of weeks and months.

In the SME lending sector in particular, a major bottleneck for growth is the lack of sufficient access to financing. Most banks find MSMEs and their credit history unsatisfactory to provide financial support. As one of the largest contributors to the economy, MSMEs have to deal with multiple financial issues and remain stuck in a financial cycle of getting a loan approved while knocking doors from bank to bank.

In the traditional banking system, the average “time to decision” for lending to small businesses and companies is between three and five weeks.

The average “time to cash” is almost three months. Thus, Biz2X utilizes technology to help banks make loan processing more efficient and enable them to provide smarter loans. The Biz2X platform offers end-to-end loan management capabilities for loan-level pricing, a risk analysis toolkit, credit policies configured to banks’ needs, cross-device compatibility among others.

2. Aye Finance: Aye Finance is the only scaled pan-India player offering unsecured small-ticket loans to a large credit-starved micro-enterprise segment. Aye has cracked this difficult to lend segment with its unique cluster based credit rating approach and optimally digitized phygital model.

Headquartered in Gurgaon, it has 311 branches across 20 Indian states and has a team size of over 4500+ employees.

3. BankSathi: BankSathi helps financial institutions and customers to achieve their desired business goals. Based on what they want, what they can’t do, and some basic information, this platform offers customers from rural and semi-rural India investment options.

Thanks to this, customers can choose the best option and be directed to financial institutions that offer the services they need. If you want to make an impact on the real ‘Bharat’, educating and raising awareness in rural India is something to be proud of.

The goal is to help people establish basic rules for managing their finances and take control of their money. To achieve these goals, BankSathi not only hires people from rural India but also trains and prepares them for employment. People do not have sufficient understanding of money to use financial products wisely. The aim is to inform and increase public awareness of various financial products and services.

4. FidyPay: The lack of trust was caused by the idea that since the majority of payment processors were located in large cities, they could only serve that population and not meet their particular needs. FidyPay is unique in that it recognizes that not everyone is comfortable paying online, can afford a smartphone or even has access to an internet plan.

Solutions offered by FidyPay include micro-ATMs, money transfer services, links, UPI, QR codes, autopay, PoS solutions and micro-insurance services that can make banking possible in smaller cities and towns.

Primary customers are small and medium-sized enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, it also works with local governments and residents of lower-tier cities to spread awareness of digital payments. More people in rural and semi-urban India are expected to adopt digital payments as smartphone penetration increases rapidly and data plans become more affordable.