Abhishek Joshi Abhi s he k Jo s hi
We can all agree that leadership styles severely
impact employee productivity, interdepartmental communication, and product and business development. Leaders are essentially meant to enhance employees’ commitment towards reaching their full potential in achieving a value-added shared vision with integrity and passion.
The role of progressive and visionary leadership is allimportant when it comes to new sectors like fintech. Leadership needs to be able to envisage the future and be ahead of the curve when it comes to taking bold business decisions. The future of business lies in digital transformation, and it requires a pragmatic leader with the foresight to set the enterprise on the right path.
Financial services businesses have undergone more change in the last three years than in the last three decades. It’s very important for people leading engineering and product teams within financial institutions to respond quickly to market dynamics, underlying technical changes and improvements to their services.
Leaders also have to show a lot of empathy towards customers and their needs, which has become one of the most important factors in the success of new financial services companies. Overall, being responsible for other people’s money is a challenging task and being a person with a lot of integrity and empathy is of the essence.
Leaders come in different shapes and sizes, and people from different backgrounds and experiences tend to bring unique perspectives on things. As the fintech landscape is evolving rapidly, we need people with more and more diverse ideas on how to make financial tools universally available to empower people towards their individual progress.
This requires a good understanding of how technology is evolving in terms of payments, banking, investing, and lending, among others. At the same time, one also needs good observation skills toward consumer behaviour and trends.
Mapping the journey of the visionary leaders who are transforming the future of the finance industry, Insights Success sheds light on ‘ The World's Best Online Financial Derivatives Institutions.’
Flip through the pages and indulge yourself in the odyssey of prolonged excellence.
Have a Delightful Read!
Business Finance Depot offers financing, marketing, construction, and design services.
David CEO Coates Finance Brian President Finlocker Naser Taher Chairman MultiBank Group Adeshina Adewumi CEO Trade LendaWith over 20 years of experience, Coates Finance ensures you the best guidance from the smartest people in the industry.
FinLocker offers the next generation in customer relationshipbased performance marketing to empower mortgage originators, lenders, servicers, banks, credit unions, and credit counselors to provide their customers with personalized financial solutions and experiences.
MultiBank Group’s cutting-edge trading platforms offers groundbreaking levels of stability and reliability.
Trade Lenda is digital financial service solution enabling access to credit for MSMEs leveraging alternative data sources to qualify character and capacity
Brief Company Name Featured Person Paul Bosley Founder Business Finance Depot Black Vieaux
Capital is an important component of every
commercial enterprise. Business organizations need funds for their development, revamping, expansion, and new initiatives. The Non-Banking Finance Companies also known as NBFCs have played a pivotal role in meeting the financial needs of individuals and businesses that have traditionally remained un-served or underserved by banks.
With stricter regulations on NBFCs, the cost of borrowing has increased and NBFCs are focusing on niche markets and personalized products and services. This has propelled the NBFCs on developing innovative products and catering to low-income, urban customers in unorganized sectors.
Supported by the innovations in the fintech, NBFCs are adopting business and operational models powered by
technologies that seamlessly facilitate the design, launch, implementation and execution of tailored products and services. Investing in new technologies and strategic partnerships with incumbent financial institutions and FinTechs also allows NBFCs to lower their costs when it comes to increasing their customer base, lowering customer acquisition costs, servicing existing customers or de-risking the portfolio while trying to overcome the increasing formal credit penetration in a growing economy.
Today’s FinTech companies are efficiently making use of new-age technologies to overcome challenges and build products and services such as last-mile reach and delivery, alternative credit models, fraud detection, regulatory compliance, enterprise automation for accounting, treasury, and reconciliation for traditional NBFCs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a cutting-edge technology for the NBFCs, that has elevated their decision-making process and has expanded their 360-degree perspective. In the beginning, AI and ML tools assisted NBFCs primarily with credit and risk management; AI is now a necessity that can be effectively leveraged across departments. It has helped in the scrutinization of the credit aspects for the MSMEs and developed a deep understanding of the micro market. NBFCs use a lot of data and external applications to create their underwriting models which consider the business segment, hyperlocal geo-analytics and other behavioral attributes of the small entrepreneurs.
The developments in technologies have helped in automating several processes in the functioning of the NBFCs. The recent applications of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) have contributed to executing data management, document verification, scrutinization, analytics and processing. RPA has enabled paperless processing with immediate real-time reconciliation thereby expediting the business cycles at a faster momentum. RPA has assisted in faster loan processing from origination to disbursement.
Progressive NBFCs have implemented process-driven analytics solutions to showcase the flexibility provided by data analytics and advanced analytics models to forecast customer defaults. Adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) models have minimized the upfront hardware and infrastructure cost. The solution features an analytics platform allowing users to slice and dice data across various dimensions to gain insights into loan application portfolio, exposure and funding aspects, customer, and loan performance The solution offered analysis to enable decisions for corrective actions in terms of their response time, application aging, collection performance, sales team performance, and more. It has helped in exploring, tapping and serving the undeserved and unserved strata of the economic table. Advanced analytics has offered 24X7 customer support with higher scalability and agility.
Modern tools like Application Programming Interface (API) are recent trends in Banking and Financial Services. They
are a set of general information that allows the admittance of software programs. This technology enables NBFCs to share their data through third-party applications.
APIs are transforming businesses by offering endless possibilities to banks and financial companies. According to a Research and Market report, by the end of 2024, the global API management market is expected to reach $6.2 billion. As competition rises between traditional banks and fintech startups, banks have started opting for APIs to embrace a digital ecosystem and assimilate more globally.
By embracing APIs, NBFCs are enhancing their services and rapidly adapting to the evolving demands of the customers. Banking APIs facilitate easy and fast KYC and onboarding, opening accounts (virtual accounts, savings or business accounts), fintech payments, debit cards, and launching BNPL products, this makes way for better business growth, customer engagement, and retention.
The Blockchain can streamline banking and lending services, reducing counterparty risk, and decreasing issuance and settlement times. It allows authenticated documentation and KYC data, reducing operational risks and enabling real-time verification of financial documents.
The modern blockchain enables more open, inclusive, and secure business networks, shared operating models, more efficient processes, reduced costs, and new products and services in banking and finance. It enables digital securities to be issued within shorter periods of time, at lower unit costs, with greater levels of customization.
Digital financial instruments may thus be tailored to investor demands, expanding the market for investors, decreasing costs for issuers, and reducing counterparty risk. Blockchain enables real-time, multi-party tracking and management of bank guarantees and letters of credit.
Depend on faster and more accurate reporting with an automated compliance process that draws on immutable data records. Benefit from the near real-time, point-to-point transfer of funds between financial institutions, removing friction and accelerating settlement. 91% of Banks have invested in Blockchain technologies in 2018. Approximately 66% of financial institutions are running at scale with blockchain.
Consumer lending has evolved into a sophisticated enterprise of data-driven personalization, hyperlocal segmentation, and real-time, always-on digital marketing, trying to find the perfect offer for the right consumer at the most opportune time. It is all about 'leads' and about 'conversion.' Financing a house through mortgage lending is no exception. What used to be a predominantly relationship business has reinvented itself on the internet-social-digital stage and is working on playing a bigger part in the digital transformation of our daily lives.
Through this analytical machine, though, fall through many that don't have the highest 'conversion' value – consumers who may not imminently make a purchase and, therefore, are less valuable for the transaction-driven revenue models prevalent in most financial services marketing. While perfectly rational on the surface, how, then, should we look at the impact of this transformation on those consumers who 'need some help'? Those that (i) may not have the historical advantages of being able to build credit, (ii) that have had a bump or two in their past credit histories due to structural economic conditions, and (iii) those that selfselect and sit out of the mortgage process because of various levels of uncertainties and intimidations that present themselves. Marketing machines tend to ensnare this population in less-than-ideal credit products, often unsustainable for the borrower, further compounding their economic viability.
Here in lies an opportunity for seasoned industry veterans and always hungry-to-learn technologists to pursue a path of innovating with a purpose: to make that first homeownership opportunity possible, make credit for that first home accessible, and set our consumers on a path for sustainable wealth-building. The mortgage industry can do this by riding on two fundamental technology transformations that will underpin human-computer interactions for decades to come… open banking and generative artificial intelligence.
Open banking, the concept of making a consumer's financial data securely available upon consent, is a driving force of innovation for fintechs in the banking industry, who have already transformed our daily lives with numerous products and services. We can access our bank accounts while on a website's shopping cart, transfer bank accountto-bank account, and not write checks or use credit cards that take days, if not weeks or months, to settle.
There is a ton of innovation here. Opening banking can help lenders obtain a more accurate picture of a consumer's financial situation and risk level by responsibly identifying their willingness to pay their monthly recurring obligations, for example, utilities and rent, and create a viable alternative to conventional credit scores. This development has been a game changer, especially for those with no credit or thin credit files. This population, who, by traditional means of credit assessment, would have remained on the edges of accessing prime credit, now has a fighting chance of securing a home loan just as much as those with deep conventional credit histories. This is what we call purposeful innovation. We do that a lot at FinLocker. We analyze consumer-permissioned financial data and establish sustainable paths toward homeownership. We employ artificial intelligence to analyze the consumer's consented financial data to see if we can help them better understand their spending habits and project cash-flow volatility to get a more accurate picture of their own finances before taking on debt.
While data and analytics fueled by open banking set the table to analyze a consumer's finances, generative AI can further lower the bar of engagement. Generative AI is the ability of the machine to synthesize and create novel content, not just regurgitate pre-fab numbers and information. ChatGPT is a trending example.
When applied to financial services, generative AI (without their hallucinations) can understand not just a consumer's financial data but derive motive and intentions, contrast you
with others in a 'journey like yours' –and create the certainty and confidence that you are not alone in your pursuit. Does generational income come into play for my demographic, and is it acceptable to ask about that with a mortgage professional, or will I be denied? Can I rent-share my future home with other millennials, or will the lender judge me as unable to afford the property? How do downpayment grants work? All these are contextual questions, quite personal, that open-bankingdriven financial analytics may or may not shed light on. Using responsible and generative AI, we can open the door for these conversations without fear of judgment or rejection and let our consumers fully explore their journey.
Recall our objective, sustainable homeownership. The more a consumer can understand, explore and own, the better it is for them – and most certainly, the better it is for the housing finance ecosystem (15-18% of our GDP!). So for those charting a course for purposeful and profitable innovation in this digital-social-ChatGPT era, look no further than this powerful convergence of generative AI and open-banking technologies.
Prabhakar “PB” Bhogaraju, Executive Vice-President, Head of Strategy & Product Development with FinLocker, has over 20 years of mortgage technology and consulting experience, with extensive experience in design thinking and digital business strategy, product development, and customer engagement. Prior to joining FinLocker in 2021, PB held executive leadership positions in product development, data management, and digital business architecture at Fannie Mae for ten years.
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Companies keep their early earnings in their bank for a long period of time which is the wrong thing to do. A good financial advisor to a company will suggest good options for an all-round portfolio. An ideal portfolio includes all
