How festivities aided financial services players to boost outreach - An insight

The festive season opens a window of opportunity for the financial services sector to boost outreach, sales and provide a seamless festive shopping experience to their customers. 

As per a report by Redseer Strategy Consultants, offline sales will be charged up to almost US$15.2 billion while online sales in the 2022 festive season are expected to touch a whopping US$11.8 billion.

Beyond digital payments, this financial services sector is expected to see demand for micro-loans, personal and home loans, and pay later modules, to cater to consumers purchase behaviour, especially when the biggest brands in the e-commerce, retail, FMCG, FMCD and automotive sectors open their doors to annual festive sales. 

BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) companies too have witnessed a demand surge by 50-60% in comparison to the festive season in 2021, giving a boost to the existing demand pipeline in the financial services sector. This rise in consumerism is one of the key driving factors boosting the need for robust and technologically enhanced financial services.

With this increase in demand, it becomes imperative for these organisations to enhance their reach and delivery innovation, along with personalised customer experience to cater to the sudden surge. 

While a full-time workforce can support these sectors on regular days, additional human talent is required during festivities. Traditionally, businesses start preparing for the festive season in advance as the early e-commerce sales commence. This is followed by the main Diwali and Dhanteras period when customers indulge in big-ticket purchases including consumer durable goods, gold, and assets such as automobiles or housing. 

Managing this demand needs allocation of resources including management bandwidth, money, and human talent to assemble an on-demand, flexible workforce across geographies in India, train them and manage their outcomes during the seasonal festive period. Further, an organisation would also require appropriate workforce management systems to manage the additional workforce and measure their performance. 

In addition to this, talking about the overall impact gig economy has on Indian GDP Annanya Sarthak, CEO & Co-Founder said, “With changing workforce dynamics, the gig economy presents itself as a boon for companies as well as job seekers. 

In fact, the gig economy workforce is projected to increase 3 times, rising from 7.7 million members in 2021 to 23.5 million in 2030. The gig economy is poised to create further employment opportunities and grow exponentially in the years to come. 

For instance, the gig sector has the potential to employ 2.35 crore people by FY30 and has the potential to add US $455 billion to the Indian economy at a CAGR of 17% by 2024. The gig economy is now re-writing the Future of Work - building employability, financial growth for gig partners and enterprises, along with economic impact on India's GDP.”

Opportunity for Enterprises 

To solve these challenges, enterprises in the financial services sector have been rapidly engaging with on-demand work fulfilment platforms that allow them to seamlessly ramp up/down the workforce, scale rapidly, reduce go-to-market time and get work done across different skill levels efficiently. 

A gig workforce that is managed on a technology platform provides them access to a high impact talent pool, with the right skill set, that is ready to be deployed.  

Enterprises now regard an end-to-end managed gig workforce as an efficient and speedy go-to-market solution for work execution that allows them to offload core business functions on-demand while removing hurdles of high fixed costs, long recruitment cycles, training, retention, and other compliances. 

While any business function can be gigified, the financial services sector can greatly benefit from a fully managed contractual workforce to execute different business functions such as business development, last mile operations, due diligence and customer experience to meet the festive demand.

Gig platforms offer a plug-and-play proposition which becomes a cost and time-effective channel for enterprises. While an enterprise can initiate recruitment and work independently with a gig workforce, they might find it difficult to manage a sizable workforce and their outcomes without appropriate technology or tools. 

To solve this, a gig platform leverages technology to solve any problem statement for the enterprise, enabling real-time visibility, end-to-end management of the work being executed, along with maintaining quality control to ensure responsibility for the outcomes generated.  

There’s no denying that the festive season brings with itself an opportunity for growth. Working with an on-demand work fulfilment platform can help enterprises in the financial services sector to leverage the festive period and achieve their annual business goals. 

It also helps businesses connect better with customers and streamline their experience with hands-on services. Through this method, enterprises can also leverage gig workforce to achieve 20-40% cost efficiency and ensure that their service is on top of the line with technical backing and end-to-end management & execution. 

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