Bengaluru: Cashfree Payments, a leading payments and API banking solutions company on Friday announced the launch of an industry report titled ‘Changing the retail banking landscape via savings account APIs’. The report deep dives into the Indian landscape of savings account APIs, the innovation it enables and how this is changing the future of retail banking in India. It also presents the views of established and emerging fintech players in the Indian retail banking space, on various key aspects, ending with a proposal for a new regulatory model for a licensed BaaS intermediary. This will create a ‘superfintech’, enabling white-labelled front-end business correspondents, ‘neobanks’ and other fintech models operating on the bank-fintech partnership model.
The report highlights that APIs can ‘decentralise’ banking, thus changing the way savings accounts of the future will be opened, accessed and managed. Savings account functionalities like deposits, cash withdrawals, payments, funds transfers, among others, can turn into a set of APIs, each of which then becomes Banking as a Service (BaaS) products to be leveraged. For banks, these allow them to unbundle and enable core processes like account opening, transactions and account management through fintechs, creating new retail banking touch-points.
In the retail banking space, there are significant opportunities for fintech players including the so-called ‘neobanks’ to cater to new and untapped markets. Banks have also recognised the monetisation opportunity of fintech partnerships, and are continually increasing the products they via APIs and exploring new partnerships. In order to address this new-to-market audience, fintech players can leverage savings account APIs across the country to transform the retail banking experience for customers.
The report dives into the various forms savings account APIs take, and the specific use-cases and innovation it enables in the space, including targeted service offerings for millennials, agriculture marketplaces, family focussed financial services, and others. It also allows existing fintechs and B2C marketplaces to diversify into new offerings to their existing customer base. It discusses the specific advantages that API aggregators offer from an infrastructure point of view, by aggregating APIs and providing APIs, SDKs and ‘no-code’ based solutions for quick integrations and launch of financial services.
