There is no better way to understand market trends and business drivers than by focusing on global demography. By examining demographic trends from a global perspective, rather than that of a specific country, region, or city, we’re able to see a larger picture devoid of local economic, cultural, or geographic factors that could cloud a sound global business strategy.
As we saw with the pandemic, what occurs outside of our communities has ramifications close to home: Logistic issues, the spread of disease, the flow of information, etc.
Many tech companies were able to nimbly navigate these changes. Social media channels like Tik Tok and Reddit saw double-digit user growth, with business models and marketing strategies that work on exclusivity, with subscribers getting content that can be found only on their platforms.
Fintech companies don’t have the luxury to grow the way OnlyFans did, facing regulations, infrastructure, and conservative business constraints, but that doesn’t mean they are limited in opportunities.
Over the next two decades, America will evolve into a plurality nation that will create significant value for society. The connections between people, continents, and businesses will deliver powerful benefits, and challenges for both businesses and individuals.
Combined with the hyper-growth of populations in geographies like India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America and the shift to new digital generations, businesses need to figure out how to unlock the global potential resulting from tapping into a global mentality, connecting the world, and leveraging global flows of money, services, people, and data.
Single source of truth
As businesses aim to capture new opportunities and create bold visions, they need to leverage new-age data infrastructure that can help overcome the obstacles related to providing access to capital, credits, etc.
Fintech, for a long time, had a first-mover advantage in the tech revolution. There still remains a significant growth opportunity for fintech globally. But there are challenges present that they need to address to capture stay ahead in the current economic climate as many fintech organizations are currently behind because they lack the access to global consumer insights that other industries have.
To capitalize fully on the benefits of these new trends, businesses must think differently about consumer insights.
The past decades have seen the emergence of several companies like credit bureaus or identity verification vendors in the US, however, there is a lack of infrastructure available to businesses internationally, whether they are global or local. The tools and data are often siloed into disparate solutions across different markets.
We recently worked with a global credit bureau that was grappling with its ability to expand into markets outside of its country, limited by insufficient traditional credit and financial data. They needed to transform global fraud and credit decisioning services in multiple markets. With better access to powerful disparate alternate data sources, they were able to build new risk-scoring services using a low code data integration engine.
For fintech companies looking to pivot to being more nimble and global, there are four key areas to focus on:
1. Push for new digital fintech products and tools to address net new markets and users
2. Risk management to mitigate losses, by reducing fraud and delinquencies as they grow
3. Cost efficiencies especially for lending companies, with an increased focus on profitability, sustainable growth, and fast returns from new products launched
4. More digitization and use of alternate data, open banking data to assess loans and transactions and improve conversion
The key to success in the near future is to define consumer insights that are as plural as society is becoming. Leveraging and consolidating better technology and data correlated in the same platform, providing a ubiquitous approach to decisioning models, across silos and cross lifecycle.
Bridging the gap between hyper-local and global markets
To achieve this vision, businesses must develop default global infrastructure. A common mistake, however, is to build global at the expense of the local. It is both possible and necessary to provide efficiencies to local businesses and support global expansion. To make this possible, it is important to shift from the traditional centralized and siloed business models that were built to address niche markets and use cases, one at a time, towards modern infrastructures that are built default global.
Success today requires companies to look at partners and resources that are built horizontally, with decentralized platforms that can address international markets and distributed teams to leverage the synergies between local and global markets.
Building a global default consumer insight infrastructure does not only represent a large business opportunity, but it also requires enabling significant economic growth, which is mutually beneficial for both businesses and consumers.
Pierre Demarche, CEO and Co-Founder of Monnai
Trained as an engineer in Belgium, Pierre has held many executive roles in technology businesses, across the globe. In 2021, together with co-founder Ravish Patel, Pierre co-founded Monnai a global consumer insight infrastructure start-up that enables fintech organizations to navigate efficiently the four key pillars of onboarding, trust and fraud risk, credit underwriting, and collections, across emerging and developed markets.