Fintech future bright in India, can be used to fight financial crimes: PM Modi

With an explosive growth of fintech innovation and enterprise, India has become the best destination for financial technology firms, according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Modi, who was at the Singapore Fintech Festival, sees India as an emerging market for financial technology.

The future of fintech and Industry 4.0 is emerging in India, said the PM while launching a banking technology APIX made to reach two billion people without bank accounts worldwide.

He sees greater use of financial technology in eradicating money laundering and financial crimes.

According to him, there is a huge potential in the fintech adoption and innovations, which can be used to reach out to marginalised and poor people.

Modi also emphasised on how his government in the last four years have given citizens greater access to bank accounts, credit and other financial freedoms in comparison to previous ones.

In 2014, less than 15 per cent of India's 1.35 billion citizens had bank accounts. Today, the country has more than 1 billion bank accounts, he said.

In India, Fintech has emerged as a relatively new industry. In the last few years, the billion-dollar fintech industry has registered a noticeable growth.

According to an estimate, the fintech industry will touch $2.4 billion by 2020 against the current market size of $1.2 billion.

Demonetisation is said to have played an important role in pushing Indian towards making it one of the emerging fintech markets. The number of digital payment transactions climbed to 244.81 crores in August 2018, a growth over three-fold since October 2016, according to the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology.