| |December 20198HOW FINTECHS ARE INFLUENCING FINANCIAL LITERACYBy Rohit Arora, CEO & Co-Founder, Biz2CreditEstablished in 2007, Biz2Credit is one of the leading online marketplaces for small business funding. The company has network comprising 1.6 million users, credit rating agencies such as D & B and Equifax, and small business service providers such as CPAs and lawyers.In the beginning, there was infor-mal money lending. Then banking, then accounting, then investing. And then: nothing.Financial services were stagnant for a good century, with the world preoccupied with banking. Banks have been lending to individuals and commercial ventures for years now, and because of banking's en-trenchment, many business owners seeking loans think first and only of banks.What these entrepreneurs do not know, how-ever, is that by limiting their options to conven-tional funding sources, they are missing out on new benefits: the benefits that await them in fintech.What are Fintech?Fintech­finance/technology ­ encompasses any form of technology used to aid financial service. Some fintech is mobile-first, some is computer-based, some is cloud-based. The industry itself is compara-tively quite young, but it is picking up pace fast, im-pacting companies from solo entrepreneurs to large enterprise organizations.The State of Financial LiteracyAs industries progress with technology, with finan-cial services, and with fintech in particular, we must ask ourselves: Are we ready for this? Are we finan-cially literate enough? Even as financial services us-age becomes more and more mainstream, the statis-tics reflecting the state of national financial literacy remain troublesome.According to an S&P survey, more than 75 percent of Indian adults do not adequately understand ba-sic financial concepts. The numbers are even worse for women: More than 80 percent of women are financially illiterate.Expert opinionRohit Arora
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