Banking is essential, but bank branches are not. Today, banks are at our doorsteps and indeed, inside our homes around the clock and accessible anytime, anywhere and borderless. Transferring money, getting statements, making investments, paying bills and more – all day to day banking tasks can be done through our smartphones with a few taps and seamlessly bringing together traditional banking and modern technology, thereby creating exciting new opportunities….and blockchain technology will play a key role in the shift. Non-cash transactions are growing…

• 33.2% YoY in India 25.8% YoY in China 10% YoY globally and are expected to almost double from $482B/year to $876B by 2021.
• This is according to a report from a digital consultancy Capgemini and BNP bank giving us fresh data points about the global payments market. And the signs look encouraging for crypto. Also according to this report – traditional banks still haven’t gotten the message.
• No great vision or breakthrough in society comes without a challenge. Startups in the Fintech space continue to face several hurdles specific to their sector. Foremost is culture and comfort in paying and accepting cash and paper based supporting processes. While Demonetization coupled with other measures in recent years has pushed a larger number of users to adopt digital means, close to 90% of all transactions in India is in cash for example according to India Times. Though a majority of work is being done in recent years, the supporting process which enable digital payments, digital lending still have a friction like wet signatures, physical verification of document and physical mandates as some examples. These result in high friction and increases costs of acquiring, on-boarding and serving users using digital means. As the technological age advances, the cost of user acquisition for cryptocurrency enabled payments gets lower directly helping mass adoption.
• The time to get into cryptocurrency and blockchain is still very early in 2018. Here is the data infographic of the number of worldwide non-cash transactions in Billions by regions from 2016 to a 2021 future forecast.