India’s fintech ecosystem needs to move beyond expanding access to financial products and focus on whether investors are actually achieving their financial goals, experts said at the Global Fintech Fest on September 10.
India’s digital public infrastructure has enabled financial services to reach the population at unprecedented scale. More than 1 billion Aadhaar-linked identities, over 14 billion monthly UPI transactions and around 100 million Account Aggregator-linked profiles have helped expand access to the financial system, said Smita Jha, Partner, Banking and Finance, Khaitan & Co., who moderated the panel.
But the next challenge is to ensure that access translates into better financial decisions and outcomes, speakers said during a session on building India’s financial advice stack as part of the digital public infrastructure.
Jeet Ketan Marwadi, Founder & Managing Director, 1 Finance said rapid digitisation has enabled people to access and accumulate financial products, but many investors continue to look at their finances in silos.
Mutual fund folios have grown threefold over the past five years to around six crore individual investors, he said. However, accumulating financial products does not necessarily mean that households are moving closer to their financial goals.