We had an eventful last week at Plural — pun, intended. After two odd years of virtual events & Zoom calls, we had the privilege to not just attend an offline event but to participate in one! We’re talking about the FinTech Festival India that was buzzing with 7000 visitors which took place in New Delhi from 20–22 July 2022. It was refreshing to be able to have face-to-face interactions with our customers, set up a beautiful Plural by Pine Labs booth, share 600+ giveaways with our booth visitors, and most importantly, to be able to learn from industry stalwarts!
This year’s Fintech Festival was themed ‘Unleashing the power and potential of FinTech in India’ and boy, were we WOW-ed! We were pleasantly surprised by just how many players are in the fintech space! Why were we wow-ed? It underscored the huge strides we as a nation are making in fintech and digital payments — something we always believed but witnessed first-hand.
There were fintech companies big and small offering products and services to help businesses with their finance workflows. Four broad themes emerged through the fintech players present at the event:
The combined breath of offerings by the fintech players present, covers a vast number of business workflows. So, what does this mean for us? It means the future of fintech is bright and beaming. As more businesses embrace API first solutions, newer ways to interact with financial products emerge. Hence more businesses are turning to fintech players to solve for core business solutions like vendor payouts, identity verification, customer onboarding, reconciliations, account aggregator services, payment collections and more!
We’re proud to say that Plural has all these solutions to offer businesses at a single destination. Backed up the Pine Labs legacy, Plural is positioned to enable finance workflows and provide businesses with the solutions they need, across the board. Just take a look:
With Setu and Plural joining hands recently through the Pine Labs acquisition, we’ve further broadened our offering. Now non-financial businesses can offer financial services through embedded finance — an automobile seller offering loans on his website, an OTT platform offering utility bill payment functionality to its users, a food delivery app enabling mobile recharges and the list goes on! This is only the beginning. While we stand at the threshold of a fintech boom, we’re equipped with the right solutions to empower businesses.
Panel Discussion: Post COVID era — Moving from Offline to Online — Is this here to stay?
The importance of digital to fintech was further echoed by a panel discussion at the event led by Tanya Naik, Head of Business at Plural. Shamvil Raza (Business leader Simpl), Harsh Singh (Head of Payments, Zomato), and Anujai Saxena (Chief Transformation Officer, Punjab National Bank Housing Finance) shared their views.
The big takeaway was that online is here to stay. Businesses must adopt both online and offline measures to serve their customers. Adoption of such measures has helped businesses go digital and make customer experiences better, overall. Although we are a largely price sensitive market, convenience seeking will remain a big driver among the digital-first cohort. As companies, all of us have the responsibility to ensure safety and security of our transactions and continue to instil the confidence in online payments.
As the event came to a close, we ended the day with a cocktail networking session, said our goodbyes and promised ourselves to do more such events, going forward. As the Plural team prepared to pack up, we were leaving with a renewed belief in the Plural vision and a mission to brace for the new wave of fintech.
If you’d like to learn more about how Plural can help your business, write to us at pgsupport@pinelabs.com. We’d love to keep the conversations going. We look forward to meeting you at upcoming events.
To know more about the participating organisations, click here.
Plural by Pine Labs has received an in-principle authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as a Payment Aggregator.
Setu has received an in-principle authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an Account Aggregator.
Amrita Konaiagari is a Marketing Manager at Plural by Pine Labs and Editor of the Plural blog. She has over 10 years of marketing experience across Media & Tech industries and holds a Master’s degree in Communication and Journalism. She has a passion for home décor and is most definitely a dog person.
