Fintech gets the ball rolling
DAPH BAJAS
I recently met with a businesswoman who has been inquiring about financing and has expressed interest for a partner for her business growth. Over dinner, she discussed her woes and recent worries as well as her optimism for her well-established business.
As a director of a major corporation, she learned that fintech has been a buzzword recently and there are countless technological advancements for the selection process of finding the right partner which has been very hard for her. She has been very meticulous about her criteria and careful in giving her trust. Her business has been a major name in the country and in their very competitive industry. To keep it afloat, innovation must always happen.
Selection is a mundane process, but is it endless? For the living, it’s both a choice and a chore. We live in the age of cyclical choices of embeddedness. Mark Granovetter, the famed economic sociologist, developed ‘embeddedness’ to imply that individuals and their choices are captured and refracted by their social relations and functions. To put it simply, selection is active. You think, you take a chance, you study, you manage, you give, you earn, and then you think again. Because of the “needs” and the “wants”.
As an exercise in choices and taste, try typing http://www.google.com/ads/preferences and hit ‘enter’. Using my own account, Google would like to believe that I’m a female, aged between 18 to 34 years old, who likes to listen to blues and heavy metal rock music, and who reads about urban transport and electronics and Australian football. These, of course, were based on my web history and searches Google perfectly curated what I “prefer” to be even if, truth be told, it’s far from truth.
But may selection be refined? Yes. It may be. It needs cognitive and proactive willingness. Take a step back. You not only think, you think twice. You not only read and learn, you investigate. If this could be a way to define and refine your choices, then start searching for information that would create an impact and accelerate your preferences. The more detailed, the better it is to know the ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. The world is a big platform and innovation happens every second in all parts of the world.
Take the businesswoman’s problem as a sample. As a business owner who decides on behalf of a lot of people who work for her and with her, decisions are made not on whim. For a big company who has survived a long time in a very saturated Filipino market, the drive is to respond to trends. But time is the enemy. The more you think over your decisions and your choices, you are losing grandly. Nonetheless, because we live in this epoch of fast-paced technology, decisions could be done stat and the algorithms of history are used as big data to predict the efficient way we could achieve our goals, needs, and wants.
Fintech has made the process quicker for business owners, addressing to make the development suited for businesses where transactions are happening to meet the cash conversion and earn more. Isn’t it grand to have everything work well and efficient? For a normal Filipino business owner, they take things as conservative as possible. They choose and take time to select wisely, but they beat the buzzer of technology with their valued diligence and self-reliance. This can-do attitude is good for employees but not when you’re the employer. The trends from neighboring Asian countries are swiftly hitting the Philippines turbulently especially the cities. And to be prepared for the mass tide of trend influx, businesses must take chances and mitigate risks.
Trust has been a buzzword as well. In this digital and information age, it seems like a crime not to know. In the recent news, issues of security are plaguing businesses and even politics recently (i.e. “fake news”). For Filipinos, this is a huge deal. Businesses are done in formality and hard-earned money is dealt with seriousness and strictness. Informal businesses are getting a hard time to be formalized because of the traditional documentation and piles of paper registration.
That is why fintech gets some eyebrows raised every time. How can technology make a duck farm business outside Metro Manila flourish in a matter of 24 hours? For one, fintech aims to respond in real-time and with cybersecurity. If one takes an hour to get his or her cash from the nearest rural bank to ensure money is secure, technology has provided for online transfers, and fintech is one’s aid to keep this trend afloat. If one doesn’t have a traditional bank or secure financing because of limitations and the long process, fintech is also there to get the ball rolling and make business ideas actualized for these unbanked entrepreneurs. Talk about financial inclusion!
Over dinner, I convinced the businesswoman to take a chance and to start reading about financial technology. If it saves her money and make the company’s earnings grow, then doing things on a mobile app must be the dream of a thriving Filipino business owner. Instead of standing in queue and submitting documents, waiting for business loan results in a bank, or driving to Metro Manila to make ends meet, there she is, clicking “send” and saving money one transaction at a time, at her own convenience.
Daph Bajas works as an Inbound Sales Account Manager for the Customer Experience unit at First Circle, the premier fintech company empowering SMEs in the Philippines. He earned his anthropology and sociology degrees from the School of Social Sciences of Ateneo de Manila University. He has worked as Research Assistant for Ateneo de Manila University in Manila, Philippines, and as Compensation Consultant for Emerging Markets for Birches Group LLC in New York, USA. To discuss more about financing your Purchase Orders, Notice to Proceed/Notice of Award, Sales Invoices, Billing Statements and Delivery Receipts for your business, you may reach him through his email address: daph.bajas@firstcircle.com.
The post Fintech gets the ball rolling appeared first on The Manila Times Online.