Academic

The guest and all the attendees were then shown the SIU & SSBF films which showed the rich heritage of SIU & SSBF and the aim with which it was conceived, opening remarks from Dr. Neha Parashar was next where ma’am emphasized the importance of Fintech companies and the fast pace at which it is growing and its future prospects. Ma'am shared some facts and figures about the Fintech Industry like its adoption rate in India v/s the rest of the world. The Opening address was followed by the Inaugural Speech given by our Hon’ble Dr. Rajani Gupte Vice Chancellor of SIU. Ma'am told us how the SIU and SSBF films only showed a macro view of what Symbiosis Stands for. Ma'am then went on to cover the importance of the evolution of the banking system and told us about the difficulties she faced during the COVID lockdown like not being able to go visit the bank to transfer money and finding it hard to trust payment apps like Gpay. Then went on to elaborate on how fintech is a rich domain for startups and great innovative ideas.

The Chief Guest Mr. Sanjay Pote (MD, CEO of SHCIL) delivered an introductory speech. The summary is as follows –

• He at first broke the ice in the room by asking the question “Which language are you students comfortable with English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati?”. To which the students replied “English”. To which sir commented, “You have made my life very difficult with that answer.”
• Then he asked the question “What do you think is required to be successful in life?”. An answer like Knowledge, Skills, Experience, etc. came from all over the audiences hearing all this sir said “Let me simplify it for you by rephrasing a famous Vidya Balan movie, to be successful you need – Information, - Information, - Information. All the things you said can be crunched down to information”
• Sir talked about his days when he used to work with start-ups who were the first to develop Roboadvisory technology which we now call ‘Automated Wealth Management.
• Talked about money under which he covered how money has to work for you by multiplying itself and do this he believes technology will play a huge part.
• While concluding talked about some facts and figures like the current market capitalization and Adoption rate of Fintech in India.

Mr. Vinod Kumar EVP CIO of Fino - Payments bank Ltd addressed the room with the Keynote Speech for the morning session where he covered topics like -

• What and Why Fintech? Add Technology to the existing financial system we get from Fintech. It empowers consumers to take charge of their financial lines.
• Business Aspirations of Fintech like Brand respect, Speed, Security, Long term sustenance.
• Discussed the challenges the fintech industry faced during the COVID lockdowns like challenges of scalability, remote access for employees to work from home, System responsiveness and all this had to be dealt with while sitting at home.
• Fintech provides all the required channels to experience the services the consumer requires.
• Broad coverage of Fintechs
1. Platforms
2. Software
3. Payments and currencies
4. Data analytics.
• Process optimization of fintech
1. Cyber Security
2. Compliance Management
3. Risk, detection, and other actions
4. Transactions
• Aadhar Enabled Payment Systems
• Why do unicorns fail?
1. Vision is not strong
2. The idea is not forward-looking
3. Easy availability of money
• Finally, sir concluded by talking about some popular Government Schemes under the Fintech umbrella.

This was followed by panel discussions, there were two-panel discussions during the event and the topic for the first discussion was “Future Of WealthTech - Challenges and Opportunities in Fintech Era” the panelists for it were Mr. Sanjay Pote (MD, CEO of SHCIL), Mr. Shailendra Abhyankar (Founder of FinSoftAi), Mr. Maneesh Bhandari (Founder and CEO GrowthPal Tech.), Mr. Anirudha Ambekar (Director Product Manager Oracle Financial Services), Mr. Ashish Chugh (National Head of Purnartha Investment Advisors)

The discussion was moderated by Dr. Arun Singh (Global Chief Economist, Dun & Bradstreet) and he started by adding to Mr. Sanjay Pote’s 3 requirements for success the fourth one being Curiosity. Sir then went in to talk about where India was 250 years ago comparing its Real GDP with countries like the USA, UK, Japan, France Germany, and China. It was noticed that India was ranked 3rd in this list and was looking for ways to become number 1. But as time progressed forward India started falling down the Ranks due to it missing out on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd industrial revolutions. Then sir posed the question “How should the Fintech stakeholder feel about the rapid technology innovations happening in the industry?”

Mr. Manish answered the question by saying that there are multiple stakeholders in companies (Fintech) like equity, promoter, institutional, etc. and all these stakeholders come with different expectations so all the stakeholders need to understand the vision of the company and what is it that the company is trying to solve in the market, what is the product, etc…. This will help the stakeholder to understand and grow their expectations of the business.

Mr. Arun then posed his question “Which new technology will help Fintech companies grow at a faster rate?” to Mr. Shailendra Abhyankar.

To which sir answered that it is very easy to go back even 500 years but is very difficult to go forward even 10 years but one thing is for certain that no single innovation is going to be dictating this future but rather it will be a combination innovation. Some economists believe that there will be a moment of singularity soon wherein technology will manage all the assets and people will just relax in their homes but sir personally doesn’t agree with such a line of thought rather he thinks that as AI, quantum computing, AR and VR will be the technologies that will he fintech’s move forward. This is a can’t-miss revolution for India and slowly we will move to a borderless world in the future.

“How do you see the consumer adoption rate of Fintech in India growing in the future and what could be its driving force?” was the question posed to Mr. Aniruhda Ambekar. To which sir answered that the classic example for this fintech adoption rate is UPI in which 46 billion transactions were done last year alone and the transaction value touched nearly 1 trillion dollars. This year so far, the run rate is around 6 to 8 billion transactions per month so it is expected that the industry grows by 50 to 60%.

This has helped a lot with financial inclusion for India and an important aspect is that this is a technology that India is exporting to the world and vice-versa.

Following these questions on regulatory bodies and the merger in the fintech space were posed by the moderator to the panel.

The panel discussed how regulatory bodies are just gate openers and everything, in the end, boils down to wants and needs and the regulatory bodies come in when the need arises. Mergers are a natural progression in the growth of a profitable fintech company. This is because the end motive is to make money and when an established fintech with a vast customer base acquires a company it is generally done so that it can cross-sell new products to its existing customer base.

The Moderator then asked for their concluding statements and the panel member concluded by saying how hunger is very important for success, the 5 P’s – People, Planning, Protection, Product, Pain point, to not be afraid of failure, Consumption will be the driving force behind the growth of India in the coming years, and finally ended by saying that Fintech is a rewarding journey into the future of finance.

The session ended with a very insightful Q&A session from the students , which the panelists answered in great detail. The discussion was highly informative and truly enlightening for the students, teachers as well as others who had attended the session.

The second session started with the introduction and felicitation of the panelists following which a keynote speech was given by Mr. Kaushik Chatterjee (Senior Director, FIS). Sir talked about his personal experience with fraud and his learning from it like how with rapid growth in technology we have to be very careful and build proper safety measures around it to prevent fraud as it will lead to customers losing trust in the company, this especially true when it comes to customers’ data. Sir when on to elaborate on how to go about protecting personal data and concluded by saying that while fintech is growing it is very important to have a very user-centric design, have things like a threat model, and security is part of the end-to-end lifecycle. Security is not an option but a mandate as Fintech grows.

Following this, the second-panel discussion took place, the main focus of which was “Transparency and Governance – A perspective on Cyber Security and Data Privacy”.

The panel consisted of esteemed personalities like Mr. Alok Kumbhat (Director – Data & Strategy, Dun & Bradstreet), Mr. Sunil Agithakaliya (Sr. Vice President, CRIF HIGH MARK Credit Information Service Pvt. Ltd.), Mr. Rishi Agrawal (Co-founder & CEO, TeamLease Regtech), Mr. Rahul Patil (Partner – Cyber Security, Privacy and Data Protection, Baker Tilly), Mr. Ashish Sharma, Partner, Deloitte). The moderator for this panel was Mr. Amol Dethe, Editor – ETBFSI, and ETCFO.

Mr. Amol started the session by talking about how the world is talking about Privacy and Data but nobody knows how to tackle it. He compared the current cyber security situation with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, meaning that he was able to create the monster but was unable to tame it, leading the monster to go out of control and start killing people. With this thought in mind, sir went on to ask the question “What is the current state of data in India?” to members of the panel.

The panel discussed topics like data being very critical in decision making from product designing to credit rating for individual customers, Speed at which data travels comparing 50 years prior and present, Data being the new oil, Data regulation, and the risk involved with data leakage like loss of customer trust and regulatory pressures, A users’ view on data, How India in the last 2 year created more data than before it and it is speculated that in the next 2 years we will create 5 times more data than we ever did. India’s growth to a 1 trillion-dollar economy and how data is playing a major role in it.

The moderator then went on to ask “What the new age start-ups and Fintech should do with regards to privacy?”. The panel discussed how start-ups need to have a very strong governance structure in place while they come up the valuation ladder, they should make sure that they are sourcing data from legitimate sources, Is the data accurate in nature as a lot of decisions hinge on it, so if it is garbage in then it will be garbage out for sure.

To Mr. Rahul Patil the moderator asked “How do the large Banks and NBFCs, Private and PSUs protect their data?”.

Mr. Rahul went on to discuss that large banks, unfortunately, have a traditional compliance mentality and most of the large financial institutions have no idea about the amount of data they possess, locating data is very difficult for large institutions, so to tackle that it is recommended that only required data be asked for, minimize the number of data copies, figure out the Retention period for the data collected and once that period is over the data should be destroyed or archived properly.

An audience member asked “How well should India’s Financial Sector be equipped with regards to these data breaches?”

The question was answered by Mr. Rishi, he stated the short answer would be that we are not prepared but then went on to tell the long answer where he discussed that when building highways we never think of accidents instead we think of speed which is a wrong mentality because when new highways come up people think that it is a license to drive at a faster pace this leads to increase in accidents the same things occur with data networks wherein we have built a lot of highways for data to travel quickly but no traffic signal to control the movement of data.

This was followed by questions like “How authentic is the data that is being collected?”, “What are the regulations already in place or can be implemented to prevent the piecing together of data from different sources?” Under this topic like PII, Data Protection Act, Privacy is a fundamental right but not an absolute right, how data should be handled, Aadhar Vaulting, Data Masking, etc. was covered.

During the conclusion of the discussion, the panel went on to enlighten the audience by saying that if consumers are used to consuming products for free things such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. consumer has given consent to all their terms and conditions without even reading then it is most likely that the consumer himself is the product.

The panel discussion was followed by a short valedictory address by Mr. Alok Sheopurkar (Head – HR, HDFC AMC) where sir covered the dos and don’ts of leading a successful professional life.

The session concluded with a Vote of Thanks given by Dr. Jyoti M Kappal who thanked all the guests, faculties both teaching and non-teaching, and the organizing committee students for all the work they put in to make the event the huge success it was and finally ma’am thanked the audience for being attentive and interactive throughout the day.