Greater Tech Adoption to Enhance Ease of Doing Business and Regulatory Compliance & more discussed at the TiE Delhi- NCR Roundtable

Greater Tech Adoption to Enhance Ease of Doing Business and Regulatory Compliance & more discussed at the TiE Delhi- NCR Roundtable

An industry panel at a roundtable conducted by TIE Delhi-NCR concluded that online start-ups and businesses need to be incentivized in line with the goals of improving ease of doing business, and enhancing regulatory compliance.

The attendees of the roundtable included investors, founders and senior executives, dignitaries, such as Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Info Edge, Alok Mittal of Indifi, Alok Bansal of Policybazaar, Dinesh Agarwal of IndiaMart, Pushpinder Singh of TravelKhana, Prasanna Natarajan of Hipbar, and Ashish Kapur of Yo China. Building on successful case studies, the goal of the roundtable was to gather experienced domain experts in order to come up with innovative solutions, share knowledge and best practices to promote overall long term sustainable growth.

The rise of e-commerce has changed the business landscape across the world. India too needs to be competitive and agile. Deeper collaboration between online businesses and governments and regulators will ensure a level playing field, remove systemic anomalies and lead to efficiencies of smoother routes to doing business by integrating trade and consumers within the compliance framework. Regulators desiring to regulate new age businesses should take into consideration the differences in operating model of online and offline businesses, even though they may both be dealing with the same goods or services and the same customer.

Effective adoption of technology, including authentication, KYC, and compliance protocols including blockchain-based technology, across industries will enhance democratisation of businesses, and drive greater efficiency and job creation, thereby leading to enhanced growth and revenues across consumer segments, trade as well as Government.

The theme of the conversation was Unboxing Policy and Regulatory Compliance.  Adopting open technology platforms that integrate across parties and platforms could help state governments offer better delivery of citizen services as well as enable business and trade to offer enhanced consumer centric services while offering greater transparency.

Cross Industry collaboration will help break down silos, offering a simplified level playing field, bringing clarity and promoting overarching transparency which is an important metric in ease of doing business.  The benefits of integrating automated systems into regulatory frameworks and business operations have already set credible precedents across sectors in the country.

Open collaboration and cross connectivity across platforms while ensuring enforcement, will help reduce the compliance friction between all parties concerned at the same time.  Automation will also eliminate the risk of non-compliance due to human error or bad faith conduct, while aiding businesses in enhancing their operations and end-to-end service delivery to their customers.

The participants mentioned a number of cases where online brings clear advantages, but may not have been fully leveraged.

  • India’s drive to a less-cash economy is slowed down by the apparent higher cost of digital transaction, while in reality the higher cost of cash is absorbed and becomes invisible. Cash needs to be disincentivized and online incentivized, for its many benefits for the formal economy.
  • For mobile wallets, light-touch regulation and minimal KYC norms once allowed phone number based authentication via OTP, driving over 200 million customers to m-wallets and making it easy for them to make small payments. But banking-centric regulation slowed down their growth by imposing tougher KYC norms from the banking world, unwarranted because funds travel to and from wallets only from KYC-compliant bank and card accounts.
  • Ecommerce brings greater visibility and transparency, increasing indirect tax collection as well as business for lakhs of traders, but adversarial positions and lobbying by offline traders have created tougher regulations, slowing growth, even though even the offline traders stand to gain from digital.
  • App-based taxi platforms like Ola have transformed transportation, making it safer and more transparent, but older taxi owners and unions have resisted these, as well as resisted technology that could have made customer discovery easier, and ramped up business.
  • Highly regulated retail sectors like alcohol or pharma sales, where customer age, identity or other restrictions (such as prescriptions) apply, can be transformed in ease of doing business and regulatory compliance--if simple authentication tech and eKYC  (such as Aadhaar) is used. Online can do this effectively, improving convenience and safety especially for women, and excise or other officials can get far more accurate and relevant data on sales.

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