Financial Technology (FinTech) has been around for some years before the first reported case of the COVID-19 pandemic on December 31, 2019, in China.
No one expected COVID to be a global disease until March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared it a global pandemic.
The disease shaped the way entrepreneurs around the world did business. The pandemic affected small businesses. Small business owners who had no online presence regretted their actions.
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They were unable to meet customers one-on-one because of the restrictions. Sellers took their shops online. More people resorted to buying their goods and services online.
And FinTech came to the front burner, ably enhanced by social media marketing. This article is about the ways you can use fintech to grow your business. Fintech makes it easier to streamline business management.
What is FinTech?
Financial technology is the use of digital technology by banking sectors and firms that provide financial services to deploy their products to their customers around the world.
Fintech cuts across cashless payments, virtual currencies and crowdfunding platforms among others, below are the ways to use Fintech to grow your business.
Payments
In the early 90s, it was expensive to integrate online payment into a website in the technology-advanced countries of the world. In early 2000, a few companies that integrated online payment, pay through their nose.
But now FinTech has made the cost of accepting online payments easy and affordable. All you need to get started are plugins and widgets.
The likes of PayPal, Payoneer, Flutterwave, and Paystack have made it easy to integrate a payment button payment to accept payment.
Financial Management
FinTech has been and is still changing the way we manage our money for the better. A lot of Fintech startups are introducing simple ways to manage and track your finances.
You no longer need to use spreadsheets or pen and paper for your financial solutions; you can use digital financial solutions to manage your finances in real-time.
Lending
Technology has increased the growth of alternative lenders which offer bigger yields to investors and cheaper, faster and more approval on loans for borrowers compared to traditional banks.
Private lenders continue to make available hundreds of millions of dollars in global alternative-lending space accessible for small businesses.
Cash flow
Opening a business bank account has never been easier. These cool innovations have made access to top-notch financial services possible without stepping into a bank.
In other words, you help transition “unbanked people” who desire to buy or sell online to “banked people” who now have full access to quick and affordable banking operations just by using a mobile phone. This helps your customers pay you on time, you earn MORE MONEY and everyone is happy!
Automate invoicing and payments
With fintech, you are able to turn your smartphone into a Point of Sales (POS). In fact, the conventional banking sectors who know the enormous threat fintech pose to their system are beginning to launch the fintech arm.
The most popular global fintech firms include Squareup.com, squadco.com (owned by GTCO Holdings), and Lightspeed among others.
Through them, cash management, inflow and outflow can properly be monitored on the go thereby eliminating the tedious manual handling of handling cash. Also, it has also simplified accounting through the use of software.
Final Thought:
The gradual rise in the use of FinTech has opened a door or unlimited possibilities for entrepreneurs around the world.
It enables you to offer more business services than ever for a fraction of the price of what you would have paid 20 years ago.
Today, data predictive behavioural analytics, driven marketing, artificial intelligence and machine learning are adding more dynamics to how small businesses use fintech to grow their business.
As an entrepreneur with business owners, you must be forward-thinking and keep up to date with FinTech developments as an important part of your and your customer’s daily life. This will also improve your business and help you stay one step ahead of your competitors in the market.
Additional expenses, such as alteration fees, cancellation fees, and other hidden charges, are frequently avoided by fintech solution suppliers. There are solutions that allow businesses to send and receive money from their accounts in several currencies without incurring high conversion fees.