Fintech is here to stay and traditional brick and mortal financial institutions are already rising up from their slumber to launch digital versions of their products and services. Analysts at KPMG noted that the global investment in fintech startups jumped to $24.7B spread across 1076 deals in 2016. Interestingly, you don’t have to be a core finance person to build a valuable fintech product.

If you can identify a problem that fintech can solve; your passion, commitment, and focus might be all you need (at the start) to build a fintech company. Entrepreneur once did a feature piece on Sam Ovens, a 26-year-old who built a $10 million consulting business from scratch. In his advice to inexperienced entrepreneurs, he noted that

“thanks to the huge availability of information these days, any entrepreneur can teach him or herself just about anything.” 

Interestingly, Sam’s first three businesses failed but his resilience and willingness to learn from his mistakes eventually led him on to success.  If you are willing to jump on the entrepreneurial rollercoaster, below are three interesting opportunities that you might want to pursue in fintech.

Simple and cheap accounting tools for small businesses

Providing accounting solutions for businesses is a big business. From the humble days of pen on paper, VisicCalc, Excel, QuickBooks among others; businesses can’t do without accounting tools. Many of the business accounting solutions are either too complex for the average business owner or too expensive for a fledging business. The free ones have are bloated with Ads and you might need to pay for customer service.

Small businesses, freelancers, and people who work from home need simplified and affordable accounting solutions. Being a small business owner is hard enough, adding the extra accounting and bookkeeping responsibilities can be a draining chore. If you can find a way to help people manage their business finances easily at an affordable cost, you’ll be surprised at how soon you can scale and grow your startup.

Smarter personal finance management tools

Fintech is already putting an end to the reign of financial advisors with the arrival of products and services to help people manage their finances. There are apps for budgeting, tracking expenses, making automated savings, paying bills. Robo advisors are even providing personalized wealth and investment management solutions.

However, there are still opportunities for smarter personal finance management tools. For instance, many people still don’t know how to separate their wants from their needs and they end up making impulsive purchases that hurt their finances. Many people are struggling under huge debt burdens and an automated debt consolidation tool could be a saving grace for them.

Smarter microfinancing solutions

The rise of peer to peer lending is already providing micro financing solutions to people who are ‘unserved’ or ‘underserved’ by traditional financial institutions. However, banks still control a large part of the financial services market and true digital banks could cause a huge paradigm shift. I am especially looking forward to alternative financing options that allow people to pay in installments when buying goods online and offline.

Analysts expect the lending and loans industry to be worth $1 trillion by 2025; hence, the growth opportunity for fintech disruptors is massive. A true digital bank that makes it easy for people to access business and consumer credits should enjoy a warm welcome.