Fintech – Business Incubator Best Practices

Business incubators have been the most common way of getting an industry clustered. What i did not find so far is well established best practices of business incubation for fintech industry. What i tried covering in my thesis is an element of best practices for business incubation which can help early stage fintech start-ups in many ways.

Most of the early stage fintech start-ups who do not sustain is because of lack of these best practices. Hence, it becomes important to establish best practice for fintech start-ups. The structure of these best practices can be divided into 3 parts:

1. Management of the incubator program.
2. Key Entrepreneurial Support Services.
3. Commercialization services.

While managing an incubator program, one should conduct a feasibility analysis before starting a program. This basically helps foreseeing any hurdles one may encounter while running a program. And for any program to succeed it is also important to have agreement driven mission statements which drives the incubator as a whole. In addition to this there is also a need to established performance evaluation criteria and one of the way to this is by analysing the number of entries and exits in the fintech industry and to do a comparative analysis it is also collect and maintain outcome data.

Under the key entrepreneurial support services what one needs to look at is how good has been the entrpreuneral education. It happens many times that start-ups with best technical knowledge lack business acumen. This ranges not only in the area of “How to run a business?”  But also understanding the regulatory aspects of industry. And in the area of fintech this is of a priority. As most start-ups don’t like to be governed like banks, understanding existing regulations is important and what can be complied to while we wait regulations for fintech industry.

Establishing Incubators in educational institutions and connecting them with a program is an ideal to promote start-up culture. Networking with potential clients and start-ups also helps form a collaborative model which is the scene of the near future. In addition development of soft skills is important.

Other miscellaneous activities such has assisting in commercialization of technology and support to intellectual property rights are important elements of incubator best practices.

So now one can easily observe how important these best practices can play a key role in development of start-ups in fintech industry.

-Shwetal Gajbhiye
Strategy Consultant
Fintech

 

Welcome to the world of disruption

Let me start the post with quote by Prof Clayton Christensen from Harvard.

“The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption”

If you observed, so far you must have heard the word disruption 3 times in this article  (including in the title) and believe me i have heard this word umpteenth number of times in last 4 months.

So what is this buzzword all about?

Let me keep all the jargons behind and keep it simple. Disruption is nothing but a powerful idea bringing a change. It can be observed in any part of the industry. Supply chain,IT , Retail etc. Where we have seen disruption in last 3-4 years is, in financial services.

And what is the disuption in financial services ? The answer is FinTech.

A new and innovative way to provide services, treat customers in a complete new fashion and keep up with fast pace technology changes. Imagine you taking a ride in a taxi to your office and pay the tarrif using your cell phone or mobile wallet. Isnt it simple ?

Though this example sounds very elementary, in the current times this has a huge market in Payment sector. Trax pay and TransferWise are classical example for this. Though this change has dominated in payment sector , other sectors like lending, analytics are also positively impacted by this change. The volume of transaction has increased and cost has subsequently reduced.

Though many people call it a bubble, looking at the current landscape this still has a lot of potential and long way to go. I guess this is enough for a daily dose of information.

This is Shwetal signing off from here. adiós