EMPOWERING FINANCIAL INCLUSION THROUGH FINTECH

Financial Technology (FinTech) is used to describe new tech that seeks to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services. At its core, fintech is utilized to help companies, business owners and consumers better manage their financial operations, processes, and lives by utilizing specialized software and algorithms that are used on computers and, increasingly, smartphones and mobile devices. Fintech, the word, is a combination of "financial technology". Over the past few years, FinTech has been embedded in the financial services ecosystem to such an extent that the term has now made its way into a few leading dictionaries. While the general perception of FinTech is ‘products and companies that employ newly developed digital and online technologies in the banking and financial services industries’, we believe that FinTech has evolved to perform a much more strategic and focused role. The wider objective of FinTech is to serve the unmet financial needs of those segments of the population which are not the core target segments of traditional financial services models. Thus, FinTech aims to contribute to the larger goal of financial inclusion (Lele S.,2019). This article will analyses several studies which focus on the characteristics of FinTech, intending to offer a synthesis of the ways in which it impacts financial inclusion.