With an aim to promote startup in the state Maharashtra government is mulling to have at least 500 well-funded startups in near future, said a senior government officer. Recently, the state government has announced Maharashtra FinTech policy 2018 and Maharashtra FinTech Registry under which startups can avail various services.
“We envisage that in near future we will at least have 500 FinTech startups who are enabled, stable, have successful sizeable funding and are going to make India and Maharashtra proud,” said Kaustubh Dhavse, Joint Secretary & officer on special duty to Maharashtra Chief Minister.
While speaking at a Fintech conference organised by The Internet & Mobile Association of India in Mumbai Dhavse asserted that Maharashtra had become the first state in the country to have a comprehensive FinTech policy. He emphasised the progressive role of the government in doing the quality evaluation of new FinTech startups in AI, Blockchain and Machine Learning.
He also highlighted initiatives taken by Maharashtra government – Maharashtra FinTech policy 2018 and Maharashtra FinTech Registry – where all startups will be registering themselves to avail various incentives like the opportunity to represent them, online auctions, and participating government policies.
Earlier, the state government had launched India's first state-level dedicated fintech policy which included a startup “Sandbox” on the lines of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The sandbox allows startups to register their applications for fintech companies and banks to work upon. The regulatory sandbox approach allows startups to test their technology under highly controlled but real-time conditions and has also been recommended by the Reserve Bank of India in recent times.
MAS's sandbox approach allows businesses to tinker with the legal complications that their technology or financial solutions can run into and get guidance from regulatory bodies on how they can reduce risk to the business as well as consumers.
