Finance

While the November 8 announcement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on demonetisation of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes focused largely on the need to root out black money, fake currency and terror funding, the government's narrative changed a bit over the next 10 days. It increasingly became all about encouraging India as a whole to move to a less-cash, more-digital-payments society. A number of new concessions and initiatives were announced to give a big push to digital payments.

Those announcements have certainly given a huge boost to the still nascent mobile payments companies, and were good news for banks issuing credit and debit cards. While it can be debated whether boosting digital payments was actually the initial goal of the government when it announced demonetisation, it cannot be argued that financial technologies will play an increasingly important role in the future. Subsequently, the banking and finance environment will also undergo a sea change with innovations in the fintech space.

While digital payments, and especially mobile wallets, have got a lot of publicity because of the demonetisation move, the other areas in fintech have received relatively less attention. But innovations such as peer-to-peer (p2P) lending and the rise of digital currencies, such as bitcoins, could herald a revolution beyond what we have seen so far, and completely transform the banking and finance sector as we know it.