A New Relationship With Money Fable Fintech is designed to offer 'as plug-n-play as possible' technology platform to banks across the world for processing cross-border transactions better and more efficiently across multiple channels

Financial services in 2020 were defined by a sudden acceleration in digitization and digital engagement, pushed by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Exchanges shut down their trading floors and moved to remote trading, mobile banking transactions spiked, personal trading apps saw record transaction volumes, and call center personnel kept customer support going by working from their living rooms.

We are moving further into a financial world where technology controls technology.

While the financial services industry was able to weather the digital tsunami and continue its operations, it has become clear that the winds of change are not transient. Financial institutions are now thinking strategically about their technical setup and questioning whether the tools that they have previously relied on are the right ones to use going forward.

While 2020 was bleak from many perspectives, one of the rare positives is that it helped prove that agility and innovation, done right, is a game-changer. The speed at which the financial services industry transformed to help customers through the pandemic is the speed at which they want to continue operating. And that requires a culture of innovation that is embedded into the corporate culture of an institution.

From financial services institutions to vendors, regulators, and supervisors, 2021 is likely to be a year of deliberate cultural transformation to find new ways of working together to create safer, cheaper, more inclusive, and more equitable financial markets.

India's mobile wallet industry is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 150 per cent to reach $ 4.4 billion by 2022, while mobile wallet transactions will touch $ 492.6 billion during the same period, according to a report by ibef.

The industry has made strides in real-time engagement through apps and instant banking, which generates really useful historical data. But it's been hard for some institutions to translate this information into predictive insights, and to get the data they need to really be proactive about addressing customer needs, this is where Fable Fintech, a business-to-business (B2B) provider of cross-border payment processing platforms, comes into being.

The Mumbai-based Fable Fintech is designed to offer "as plug-n-play as possible' technology platform to banks across the world for processing cross-border transactions better and more efficiently across multiple channels and access mechanisms.

The fintech platform's chief executive officer Naushad Contractor told Entrepreneur India that the idea of the company has evolved since it came into being, and added, "When we started, there was no product tech company in the space of cross-border transaction processing. We started with one product and now have eight different products for different use cases. We continue to try and help banks across the world to process their cross-border transactions better and in a more efficient manner."

He further commented that the application of AI technology has empowered the financial ecosystem as, "Apart from the minimal use in anti-money laundering and robo-advisory, in my opinion, we are yet to see the real and tangible impact of AI and ML types of options in the fintech world."

Recently, the B2B provider informed to have raised an undisclosed amount in Series-A funding round led by India-based investors that include venture capital fund Pentathlon Ventures, stock market investors Ashish Kacholia and Lashit Sanghvi, and former Wall Street banker Sumeet Kanwar. Existing investors Paytm and Infibeam Avenues also participated in that round.

The current shareholders in Fable Fintech include ICICI Bank and Muthoot Fincorp.

The startup stated that the fresh funds will be mainly utilized towards the expansion of the company's product footprint across Asia, North America, the Middle East, and African markets.

Last year, the company processed around 4 million transactions valued at almost $9 billion and claims to have been slated to grow that to around 9 million transactions and $20 billion this year.

Necessity is the mother of invention and the pandemic has only made both bankers and customers innovate in a manner that is unprecedented. The way that both banks and customers have evolved their respective approaches is a wonder in itself.

Contractor believes that some of the trends will be permanent and some may go back to the more traditional options once the pandemic is more predictable, but there is definitely a tectonic plate shift in the way banking will be done going forward.

He has further confirmed to be betting heavily on the shift in bank CIOs and CTOs to be more cloud-friendly and SaaS-friendly across the world. This will shift the deployment paradigm significantly and will lead to more exponential growth in the near future. Secondly, is to focus on security and compliance that will make the company more the platform of choice.