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The Tamil Nadu government will roll out the ambitious BharatNet project called TamilNet by November to link over 17,000 villages through high-speed broadband connectivity. This will open up tremendous opportunities in rural areas, said State IT Secretary Hans Raj Verma.
“Our next wave of champions will come from tier-2, -3 and small villages. Once we give them the connectivity, they are on par with us,” said Verma at the three-day FinTERACT 2020 conference. The event envisages to attract FinTech start-ups and collaborations for the FinBlue - a Center of Excellence in Financial Technology - with global FinTech hubs from the UK, Singapore and Europe.
Potential of TN
Verma said that Chennai has always been known as the BFSI capital of the world with all the back offices of leading institutions of the financial world in the city. The kind of talent here and throughput per employee is one of the best in the country.
FinBlue in partnership with Elcot, IT department, STPI is a fantastic example of a pioneer and visionary effort. This event will showcase the potential of the State, and India as a whole. “I appeal to all the delegates in the event to invest in Tamil Nadu,” he said.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister’s vision is to leverage technology for making a difference in the lives of ordinary people. “In partnership with banks, in Tamil Nadu we have this year pumped in nearly ₹ 15,000 crore of liquidity to the SHG members under the SHG-bank linkage programme. There is a huge potential here. We can go up to ₹ 30,000 crore. In this financial inclusion mission and bank-linkage programme the new start-ups will have a key role play in various aspects of financial products,” he said.
Omkar Rai, Director General of STPI-MeitY Govt of India, said FinBlue’s trend has been emulated by other Centres of Excellence (CoE) of STPI. So far, the STPI has launched 12 CoEs with each having a name and help in branding the centres. Each centre should be a knowledge generating place; should have best practices and research should be done, he said.
Thrust on BFSI
At the event, Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY, launched FinBlue SandBox consisting of APIs exchange; Core Banking Software; low code softwares; business analytical and performance monitoring tools and Cloud credits to provide real time environment to FinTech start-ups in developing and testing their prototypes to production grade FinTech products. He also launched FinBlue Marketplace, an initiative by STPI to connect entrepreneurs/ start-ups of the FinTech domain with mentors/ consumers/B2B players/partners/vendors.
Sawhney said that a lot of concentration of the BFSI sector has been seen in Chennai in the last couple of decades. In IIT Madras, there is an amazing amount of R&D that manifests itself as start-ups as companies and as technologies that reach the people to make a deep impact. Tamil Nadu is also emerging as one of the finest centres globally for software products, he said.
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