Computers around the world were meant to crash as soon as the clock struck 12 on January 1st, 2000. The world itself was to catastrophically end in 2012. And cars were to drive themselves by 2020. We’re now in 2022, and our computers are better than ever, cars are still being driven by humans, and even a raging pandemic hasn’t managed to make the doomsday scenario a reality.
New year predictions are clearly tough to crack, but the one I’m going to make, I’m reasonably confident of - that this will be the year of Platform-as-a-Service companies which will come out of the shadows and shine!
Making way for PaaS
The PaaS model is slowly but surely gaining popularity, given the rise of build-first business models run by savvy product teams that prefer to build rather than just aggregate. PaaS, by offering a platform to custom-build products and services on top of it, hence becomes the right solution for a myriad of companies that want to either expand their offering horizontally or vertically - or even enter a whole new area of the industry.
Testing and deployment too are faster with most PaaS providers, and it enables easier integrations and interoperability. Given the wave of product innovation and fierce battles that are raging across taxi hailing, e-transport, cryptocurrency, FinTech and most recently, grocery and services, it’s no surprise that the PaaS industry is predicted to grow from USD 44 billion (as of 2020) in revenues to a massive USD 319 billion in just ten years.
How will PaaS transform FinTech?
The PaaS revolution and FinTech’s constant thirst to push the boundaries fit together like a glove. The earliest innovation in FinTech involved improving the user experience and unbundling a singular financial service - say, payments, investments, payday loans, and so on. Customers loved the seamless experience and innovative products offered by these new-age apps, and it was more than normal for a user to have at least one app for each financial service.
However, this model had its downsides. Companies often found it too difficult to make money in a paradigm where user retention was either driven by deep discounting or heavy promotional spends. At the same time, it became hard to sustain one’s value proposition in verticals with low barriers to entry and before you know it, there are more than 1,000 apps in just India just for availing personal loans.
In addition, having to use multiple apps for different use cases often overwhelm the 80% of the average consumer base that’s simply looking to *get things done*.
The result? An incoming wave of personalization at scale with diversification of product suites across the FinTech space.
In this journey, however, businesses are finally waking up to the importance of revenue model - market - fit as opposed to just product-market fit earlier. When revenue and user retention comes into the picture, bundling becomes more deliberate and innovation is more closely tied to long-term goals rather than just a zero-sum game.
And this is where PaaS comes in. Modern infrastructure platforms provide companies the right set of tools, utilities and workflows to build their own products on top and in most cases, allow a whitelabelled go-to-market that’s up to 10x faster and cheaper than building it in house.
It’s a win no matter how you look at it - you leave the complexity of primary research, testing and building to the third party platform provider, and leverage the sophisticated technology to launch your own innovative offerings that are ready to go live out of the box. The benefits are plenty.
Significantly improve time to market by giving the client-side developers access to the tools they need to create their lending or payment flows.
Remove the burden of maintenance since that remains the responsibility of the platform provider.
Enable scalability by deploying real-time updates to serve a growing customer base and accommodate more products.
Alleviate risk since fixing any failures or bugs in the platform is the responsibility of the provider.
What does this mean for the world of financial services? Will we witness the emergence of newer products and services? Will every company embed financial services into its offerings? Will we see new kinds of financial providers altogether?
The answer is yes, to all.
Especially in sectors such as FinTech, PaaS is set to flip the build vs buy debate into one of build vs lease. For companies that want to move fast and prefer a live product over the research journey in creating it, PaaS will allow faster innovation, business alignment and stronger go-to-market proposition with horizontal or vertical specialization.
PaaS allows for never-before-seen flexibility - allowing any business to launch their own end-to-end product offering. It also lays the groundwork to bring together a diverse set of financial services on one single platform, thus balancing user retention with business model viability.
The possibilities of PaaS are endless - I hope it prompts companies to build more, ship more and learn on a steeper curve, and as a byproduct, lead the unprecedented scaling of financial services across geographies and industries, transforming the very face of finance.
We may still be years away from those self-driving cars, but the future of intelligent financial services is now.
My contact number :-8250461298
Plz.you provide me your.partner code