New York-based Techpreneur Shares Why India May Lead the Digital Disruption Of the 12 Synechron's FinLabs, three are based in India.

In the financial space, with services like UPI and other digital initiatives, India is at the forefront of adopting technologies. While most of these initiatives are because of the developing fintech ecosystem in the country, we cannot ignore the efforts of the technology providers in the financial services segment and one such company is Synechron.

The company was co-founded by Faisal Husain along with his friends in the early 2000s when starting a business was a strenuous task. There was merely any venture capital available, the recession had started to kick-in and markets were running tight. But it was a well-calculated risk. As Husain claims, the company has today grown to be a USD 500 million firm registering a CAGR of over 25 per cent year on year.

To continue its commitment to this space and to understand the potential of new technologies - how they can be applied to domain-specific financial services and insurance use case, the company recently launched Financial Innovation Labs (FinLabs). Of the 12 FinLabs, three are based out of India - Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

In a conversation with Entrepreneur India, Husain shares how new age technologies are revolutionising the Indian innovation ecosystem.

Digitalisation of India

The evolution in technology has witnessed a paradigm shift from traditional banking to Fintech and has thus translated into a whirlwind of transformations, ranging from upgraded infrastructure to enhanced reliability.

Husain believes that the advancements in new-age technologies like blockchain, AI and robotics are creating opportunities for the BFSI sector. This combined with natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, data science and voice search will provide value-added services for the tech-savvy customer.

Talking about how the distributed ledger technology is shaping up in India, he says blockchain is still in its nascent stage and is yet to see mass adoption across the industry.

"Working with our clients across the globe, we are seeing a lot of action in terms of use cases implementation and enterprise blockchain adoption. They are advancing from the POC stage to pilots and field trials on their path to production for the technology," he added.

He has also observed that Indian banks along with other financial institutions have started to experiment with the technology for cross border transactions and trade finance.

"While financial services will continue to lead blockchain adoption, healthcare, manufacturing and energy sectors will also follow suit. India is the world's largest recipient of international remittances and contributes a huge chunk of the country's balance of payments," he said while adding that, "Blockchain helps in reducing overseas and domestic transaction costs, KYC charges for banks and also helps prevent financial frauds. Due to these features, Nasscom believes blockchain can add up to USD 5 billion to India's economy in the next five years."

India Innovation

India is heavily focusing on these new age technologies to revamp its financial services sector. According to Husain, India has its young, increasingly educated workforce and an innovation-accepting regulatory landscape to its advantage.

"While India does have a skilled talent pool in the country, there is an evident brain drain in areas of emerging technologies. Innovations in blockchain and AI require huge volumes of data, which further demands a robust security infrastructure," he shared.

On the other side, global companies have started to acknowledge the importance of cybersecurity. India needs to pick pace in this segment.

"The lack of technology infrastructure could also hinder innovation in technology space and that is a worry of sorts," he opined

The India Focus

Apart from the strategic importance for Synechron, Husain says Indian is where the company set off its first offshore delivery centre for its talent scenario and affiliated advantages

"Owing to good engineering, technology and science colleges offering specialized technical courses, India has a huge talent pool of young skilled workforce in niche technologies which is yet to be fully utilized. The ongoing improvement in the education sector is further strengthening the skillset. Global companies are looking towards India to harness this talent pool," he concluded.