Infosys chairman and co-founder Nandan Nilekani has pitched for empowering people and businesses to own their data in order to streamline fintech and digital banking services in the country.
He said that account aggregator programmes must be encouraged so that businesses and individuals can access their own data for any service. Businesses can own data for any information they want pertaining to their GST filing or tax details on the go. This can help in the faster processing of loans, credit for individuals and businesses. Nilekani was speaking during a session on “Why the future of Fintech is French” as part of the Bengaluru Tech Summit.
Nilekani said that India can associate with French companies especially startups in the Fintech space. He mentioned that Infosys is the digital innovation partner of Roland Garros or the French Open tournament in Paris and recalled that when he was the chairman of UIDAI he had associated with French companies to provide biometric technology and had involved them in the deduplication process while providing the biometrics technology for the platform. Nilekani further said that the Aadhaar programme has given a digital number to billions of people across India and providing biometrics and deduplication is an intrinsic part of the programme.
“The Aadhaar platform backed the cash transfer programme and billions of dollars was transferred into the account of scores of people across the country over the last few months during the pandemic. Besides this, today the UPI system combines the rigours of the banking system. UPI platform after its launch in 2017 had initially only 100,000 transactions a month but now has around 2 billion transactions a month,” remarked Nilekani.
During the session, the French ambassador to India, Emmanuel Lenain, said that India and France can go a long way in working together in cutting edge innovation and many French companies had research centres in the IT city of Bengaluru.
He mentioned that Indian companies can leverage France's start-up ecosystem including the fintech sector as it was the top startup ecosystem in the EU and had more than 10,000 startups including 14 unicorns. He said that both the countries can collaborate on cutting edge innovations especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the 5G network.
