How the Fintech Industry is Drawing Young Talent in the Country The promise of fintech is by no means limited to just enhancing India's banking and finance sector
By Nikhil Barshikar •
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A few years ago, fintech, or financial technology, entered India's banking and finance landscape silently and without much fanfare. Over the past few years, the sector continued to grow steadily, as new technologies and financial products continued to emerge in the market. But it wasn't until 2016 that the entire country sat up and took notice of fintech, a sector that has since come to herald the promise of a new age of banking for the country. The promise of fintech, however, is by no means limited to just enhancing India's banking and finance sector. In fact, it has emerged as a highly promising industry in terms of generating employment for the country's young workforce.
The Fintech Opportunity: A new hope for India's Young Workforce
The fintech industry is creating new and exciting opportunities for the country's workforce in such areas as payments, retail baking, peer-to-peer debt financing, personal finance, asset management, institutional investments, remittances, and financial research. However, the primary enabler for all these segments is data. The volume of data that is being generated and leveraged by the digital banking and financial services industry is massive and unprecedented. As a result, the demand for technically trained data scientists is growing rapidly among fintech companies. With an increasing number of people in the country consuming fintech products, data scientists are required to manage large, complex sets of data and organise them to facilitate faster and enhanced delivery of various services to consumers.
Artificial Intelligence
Along with Big Data and analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are among the key technologies driving the fintech industry. These technologies power a majority of products and services on the fintech spectrum, while automation has proved to be one of the key driving forces of the digital banking and finance ecosystem. The implications of automation are also massive. It is not only enabling fintech companies to significant lower operational costs and increase the efficiency of various processes, but also helping them to predict various financial outcomes with much greater accuracy than traditional banks and financial institutions. It is this dynamic nature of fintech that is drawing a large number of millennials, a highly technology savvy demographic, to explore career opportunities in this sunrise industry.
Employment Generation
Thanks to the constant innovations and continuous flow of investments into fintech, the industry is beating traditional BFSI players in generating employment for the country's youth. Furthermore, India is likely to see a much faster increase in the number of financial technology jobs compared to the rest of the world, due to increased outsourcing opportunities on the back of a highly skilled workforce trained specially in analytics and AI-driven technologies like Machine Learning.
The fintech industry presents a plethora of opportunities for young students and professionals to capitalise on the demand for new-age technologies by acquiring advanced skills such as data analytics, financial analysis, etc. It would then not be too inaccurate to say that in the next few years, fintech would surpass the traditional BFSI industry in terms of growth, as well as size. Moreover, with an adequate supply of skilled talent, the impact of fintech on overall economic growth and job creation in the country will be unprecedented in scale.
