Advancements in the Indian Fintech Landscape

Introduction

The terms financial inclusion and financial technologies have taken center stage in the business world in recent years. Fintech companies are known for disrupting the market and consequently reshaping it into a highly competitive one. The unfathomable progress in the digital technology arena in recent years has resulted in humans' over-dependence on technology (Wiyono & Kirana, 2021). The financial sector is not new to this new technological arena, with new-generation entrepreneurs and angel investors hoping to leverage game-changing innovation in financial services to bridge the lacuna that emerged in the aftermath of the crisis (Vives, 2019), and the turbulence has become a buzzword in the business sector. Technology in the financial sector has assumed the term “financial technology,” popularly referred to as “FinTech” (Campanella et al., 2023), and it has received due attention from academic and business practitioners recently, often features in public discourse and news (Lagna & Ravishankar, 2022). Essentially, it denotes harmonizing cutting-edge technology into financial services and processes. Identified as a key technical term, FinTech, short for financial technology, is mainly driven by innovative and emerging technologies (Li & Xu, 2021). It includes the application of computing and digital technologies in offering financial services, redefining how financial institutions operate, and significantly influencing our lives. This has given rise to the emergence of allied terms like PayTech, InsurTech, RegTech, and FinTech (Sangwan et al., 2019). According to Zavolokina et al. (2017), “FinTech” symbolizes the integration of finance and information technology. Gai et al. (2018) describe FinTech as an emerging term that represents the adoption of novel technologies by financial institutions. It includes various new business models, technological applications, and services that substantially affect the financial market and service delivery. Its rise to importance is linked to numerous benefits, such as enhancing operational efficiency, reducing costs, challenging traditional industry structures, blurring industry boundaries, fostering strategic disintermediation, creating new entrepreneurial opportunities, and making financial services more accessible (Agarwal & Zhang, 2020; Cao et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2020; Suryono et al., 2020). Key technologies in FinTech include internet technology like big data (Chen et al. 2017), distributed technologies (such as blockchain and cloud computing) (Belanche et al., 2019; Chen et al., 2019; Wamba et al., 2020), artificial intelligence (Belanche et al., 2019), Internet and the Internet of Things (Ruan et al., 2019), and security technologies (Wamba et al., 2020). These technologies have significantly altered the traditional development model of the financial sector (Li & Xu, 2021).