COVID-19 drives the demand for online financial services

INDUSTRY.co.id - With a growing spread of coronavirus and social distancing globally, people are increasingly searching for digital services able to meet their current needs in food and essentials, healthcare and finance. 

Asia is not an exception. As the findings of Robocash Group have shown, the pandemic has made 41% of its customers in the region use remote financial services more often.

Among the latter, online financing solutions were mentioned most often, with 23% of all responses in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. 

E-commerce took second place with 16%. Meantime, tools allowing digital payments of utility bills and other services, as well as online banking apps, got similar results - 13%. 

Digital and mobile wallets to make received 10% of responses. Remarkably, both open data sources and in-house records of the company have confirmed these findings.

In particular, Google Trends shows a significant spike in the search requests devoted to online loans in the Philippines. 

Driven by the community quarantine in several regions in the country, the trend started on the 16th of March and has demonstrated continued growth since then, reaching the maximum height for the whole time. 

Meantime, the own statistics of Robocash Group in Vietnam and Indonesia have also demonstrated an increase in demand for fintech financing.

In comparison to the first half of March, the average daily number of new customers in these countries has grown by 38% and 52%, respectively. 

In this respect, India has shown a moderate increase of 7%. At the same time, the lockdown of almost 100 million people in 80 cities across the country has slowed the trend. 

The company explains it with the limit in basic needs, which people put the highest significance during the quarantine. Still, if it lasts longer than expected, it may affect the demand for online loans the other way round.

Sergey Sedov, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Robocash Group, added: “The pandemic has drawn the lights to the digital space and the opportunities within. Thus, finance sees one of the highest online traffic growths these days. It has smoothed the negative effect on fintech to some extent and granted the industry a chance to show itself to full advantage.  At the same time, such constraint conditions give companies an opportunity to fine tune processes to ensure reliability and efficiency of their business operations”.