India tops Singapore, Indonesia in fintech study

SINGAPORE: In a report released last week, India emerged as the top nation in a fintech study of nine South Asian and Southeast Asian countries published by the Robocash Group.

Robocash is a fintech company with offices in Asia and Europe that specialise in providing technological finance solutions for the underserved by the traditional banking system in emerging markets. The South Asian nation came up in first place in several categories including the most amount of funds raised and total revenue. From 2000 to 2022, the years included in the study, in the four sectors in the survey, a total of USD 25.6 billion was raised which is 48 per cent of all funding received in the region.

India also emerged as the leading county in Robocash Southeast Asia Fintech Index. The Index aggregates scores using the following measurements - share of total funding, share of total revenue, and share of total active companies. Singapore was second and Indonesia came in third.

The purpose of the Robocash report is to gain an understanding of financial technologies development in mature and emerging countries of the South and Southeast Asian region, namely India, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The following four fintech sectors were chosen for the survey - Payments and Transfers, Alternative Lending, E-wallets and Digital Banking. For the purpose of the study, only those companies that are based in the territory of a particular country were selected, while foreign entities were excluded.

As of the end of 2022, there are 1,254 active fintech companies in the nine countries and four sectors studied. This represents a rise of almost 45 times from the 28 companies that existed before the year 2000. The growth of such firms accelerated between 2015 to 2020, when over 62 percent of the companies in the study were founded. (ANI)