During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, new fintech solutions helped SMEs and micro-preneurs survive.
Covid-19 did dip the world into a situation they that drove businesses across sectors including fintechs into uncertainty. But in many ways, Covid-19 also served as a catalyst for innovation in SaaS and other B2B segments, like fintech! As the global economy slowly tries to match their pre-Covid pace, here’s a brief overview of how Covid-19 created new opportunities in global fintech and how this impacted smaller businesses.
The last few months witnessed a growth in the use of digital payment solutions leading to fintechs introducing better solutions for small businesses, including enhanced payroll integrations and features that could help ensure secure and seamless online experiences for customers.
Contactless Payments: Ease of use, More Simplified, Enabling Smaller Business Owners
Social distancing norms have led to a fundamental shift in the way people purchase, pay and get paid. Digital payment solutions have played a key role in responding to this crisis by enabling contactless payments in-stores, a feature which is now a necessity but might not have been available in every brick and mortar establishment. Tap to pay transactions and cardless payments are now needed to help retailers and brick and mortar survive through this crisis, as several online studies have suggested that consumers would not shop at a store that only offers payment methods that require contact.
More numbers of smaller-mid sized businesses have migrated to contactless payment solutions during this time to attract customers while ensuring a sense of safety and precautions. Fintechs have complimented this need by looking for ways to leverage low cost infrastructure and various other methods to enable customers to have a wide choice during this time for instant, easy payments; methods that include QR codes, or contactless tap to phone and pay methods, all of which allow shoppers at physical stores the ability to avoid physical contact while ensuring they are able to choose from a range of instant digital payment solutions for a better experience and their own protection.
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More User Security Being Offered in Digital Payment Solutions
The Covid-19 pandemic caused the need for digital payment solutions to propel. This sentiment will remain for the foreseeable future. But by introducing new features and adding to the capabilities of payment solutions, fintechs have also to ensure their apps, platforms and user data are protected from increased online frauds. During the Covid-19 lockdowns the number of phishing and online fraud activities increased significantly leading fintechs to introduce better policies/updates and adapt their apps to help contribute to fraud prevention in digital payments. Fintechs have leveraged Artificial intelligence and machine learning to leverage location profiling and behavioral analysis to help curb fraudulent online activities. AI-powered tools enhance monitoring of online payments and responds in real-time to fraud cases. These new technologies also allow for fraud scoring thanks to multiple data points and insight into fraud patterns most-likely-to-occur on certain channels. With the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating adoption of fintech and digital payments, even digital banking solutions, new emerging technologies that create a wholesome ecosystem for this niche will erupt in the future.
Expanding Collaboration and Partnerships for Digitizing B2B Payments
The B2B payment ecosystem can thrive better when more partnerships and processes are created between larger financial institutions and fintechs, to help meet immediate needs and challenges of businesses and individuals during the Covid-19 pandemic and to also create a more secure, resilient payments infrastructure system that can help businesses and customers from around the world pay and transact for every need seamlessly. Fintechs and Financial institutions or banks need to work together to help businesses accept remote transactions and grow their customer base internationally during a time when remote selling and transacting is the norm. In order for business owners, especially, smaller business owners to make real-time payments and receive payments without spending valuable time on tracking bills, using fintech solutions to enable secure automated processes and regulate payments and associated tasks allow SMEs to thrive and save resources.
