RBI recently released a draft of Fintech regulatory sandbox framework for stakeholder comments. The draft proposes that Fintech startups could participate in a sandbox monitored by RBI to provide fresh industry solutions in tech services such as retail payments, digital KYC and remittance services, among others. A regulatory sandbox (RS) is a controlled environment for commercial testing of new technology with limited regulations and customer exposure. The RBI draft is based on recommendations from an inter-regulatory committee headed by a former executive director of RBI, Sudarshan Sen. The working group, constituted in July 2016, has members from all major financial regulators such as RBI, SEBI, IRDA and NPCI. The draft released by RBI said it would look for technology solutions which should highlight an existing gap in the financial ecosystem and provide suitable solutions in avenues such as payments interface, data analytics and blockchain. The application would be open only for registered Indian start-ups with a minimum worth of INR 50 lacs.
Growing adoption of Big Data, analytics, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things is expected to push cloud market in India to grow three fold to USD 7.1 billion by 2022, a report by Nasscom said Tuesday. The report titled ‘Cloud – Next Wave of Growth in India’, prepared with Google Cloud and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP, said cloud spending in 2018 was estimated to be about six per cent of the total IT spending. Indian infrastructure as a service (IaaS) spending was estimated to be about USD 1 billion in 2018, and is forecast to grow at 25 per cent per annum to reach USD 2.3–2.4 billion in 2022. The Indian software as a service (SaaS) market, on the other hand, is expected to grow at 36 per cent per annum and touch USD 3.3-3.4 billion by 2022. This boost is expected on the back of lower cost of workforce, abundant talent availability, mature sales eco-system, adoption of newer technologies like AI and machine learning to build products. Globally, the cloud spending on IT is growing at 16.5 per cent (CAGR) and is expected to touch USD 345 billion by 2022.
As per some of the findings as per the latest annual Analytics India Salary Study done by AIM magazine and AnalytixLabs; Data Analytics professionals are currently benefitting from the big data trending with analytics professionals drawing 26% higher than an average software engineer in India. However, the average salary of analytics practitioners has remained steady across all experience levels with the remuneration remaining unchanged from the last year. The study focuses on the salary trends and shows how analytics salaries have changed over the years, skills that are very much in-demand and the hiring challenges it could present. In another survey by AIM Magazine, it was found out that the data science sector is flourishing and there are currently more than 97,000 job openings for analytics and data science in India right now. The most important skill for a Data Scientist is Machine Learning followed by Statistical modeling. A majority i.e. 75% of the respondents are talking about the importance of Python in Data science. Industries with most demand are Most of the industries starting with IT and services at 36% followed by e-commerce at 24% and Banking at 22%.
Indian School of Business will soon set up a data repository to store all available public data in a single portal with its focus initially on agriculture, rural development and financial inclusion. It will be called India Data Portal and the portal will allow users to interact with the data, visualise it and download the visualisation for professional use.
The Indian Income Tax department will go full throttle on its use of big data in 2019-20 to book tax evaders as its IT infrastructure for profiling assessees becomes fully operational. The department’s Project Insight, which uses data analytics to identify individuals who present a high risk of tax evasion to nudge them with text messages, phone calls and emails to voluntarily comply with the tax laws, will be fully rolled out in the new financial year.
