Using female finclusion techtics

Even though achieving women's financial inclusion is challenging, fintech offers the promise of accelerating progress by providing tailored and affordable solutions to specific needs.

Key factors influencing participation of diverse groups of women in the financial landscape include:

• Expanding digital and financial capabilities.
• Product awareness.
• Facilitating navigation of the evolving digital finance landscape
• Addressing societal barriers and biases that hinder financial autonomy.
• Ensuring equitable access to digital and financial tools and resources.

Over 200 mn low-income women in rural and semi-urban areas with phones have PM Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) accounts. 67% of these accounts have been opened in rural and semi-urban areas, indicating the potential for expanding financial services. Most transactions completed on Google Pay (GPay) occur in over 3 lakh villages and towns beyond major cities.


Once the issue of access is addressed, the next set of challenges centres around reliability, uninterrupted access and consumer trust. Key to addressing barriers lies in understanding the user.

Language Tech: must be multilingual. Supporting regional languages boosts accessibility. Introduction of regional languages and 'Hinglish' on GPay has helped to make it relevant to its diverse user base in rural and semi-urban areas. Local businesses have improved prospects of engaging with customers while speaking digitally via a language and dialect of their choice in a digital payment app.

Design for all: There's an urgent need to equip women with digital and financial capabilities (DFC). While often clubbed together, digital and financial literacy are two disparate skills. Tech solutions for financial inclusion must be complemented by heavy investment into building users' DFCs for smooth adoption and onboarding. If all women users have basic DFCs, use of fintech to deliver service to the last mile would be exponential.

Trust is key: With DPI, we have an opportunity to set up a conducive ecosystem where every user is empowered to participate. Fintech innovators must focus on building high reliability and consumer trust to position tech as essential to financial services. On the backend, this translates to ensuring constant access and building strong failovers. AI and ML can enhance customer-centric financial services at scale and with efficiency.

These can enable financial service providers to proactively work towards effective targeting, customer financial education and fraud prevention. For instance, Google's DigiKavach framework employs AI-ML to identify financial fraud patterns, helping to create a more secure, trusted and reliable digital ecosystem.

Better infra: Upgraded infra focusing on speed and reliability fosters inclusivity by empowering users and providing them with equal access to opportunities and services in the digital age. Low latency ensures faster transaction processing, improving user experience, especially for those new to technology.

Reliable infra facilitates real-time access to financial services like account balance checks, transaction history and customer service support, fostering trust and wider adoption through transparency and consistent availability. Migrating services to the cloud allows financial institutions to scale their operations efficiently, adapt to changing demands and reach underserved markets.

Around 90% of women entrepreneurs in India have not availed finance from formal financial institutions. Lack of collateral ownership further adds to the credit gap. Extending credit to women, especially small-ticket loans with easy repayment options, can be efficiently tailored and offered through mobile apps. If people can't go to financial institutions, tech can bring finance right to their palms. Lines of credit, when extended through UPI apps, will drive up India's credit penetration and yield results faster, as we have seen with JAM. Digital payments can serve as a gateway into finance for women.