The Andhra Pradesh government seems to have set its focus sharply on technology-enabled services, for accelerating job creation in the state. As per a Financial Express report, chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu is targeting the creation of 5 lakh jobs in Andhra Pradesh by 2020, powered by the spurt of fintech companies that are coming up there.    

The state government has recently set up Fintech Valley in Vizag, which will serve as a hub for aspiring fintech startups and innovators, and is a unique initiative for India.      

JA Chowdary, the special chief secretary and IT advisor to Naidu was quoted as saying, “Indian IT 1.0 is facing difficulties. The next flight towards IT 2.0 will be backed by fintech. The tectonic shifts this will cause is captured by the expression ‘fintectonics’. It is a fintech culture we are creating here—a culture of doing something for the betterment of the common man, a culture of creating an ecosystem by getting the right industry linkages and finding the right formula for the critical manpower.” He also gave an insight into how the Fintech Valley will enable the growth of the tech-centric companies.

The Fintech Valley will act as a facilitator for information flow—a playground for innovators to disrupt traditional processes with new, more efficient, economically beneficial technologies that will change the way India does business,” he said.

Ever since the announcement for the Fintech Valley project was made, there has been a flurry of developments around it. The AP government has announced that it will set up a Fintech incubator fund, where it will invest Rs. 100 crore in the startups there. It has also planned to offer $1 million as the prize for the best fintech startup, based on the business plans they submit. In addition to this, they organized the Fintech Valley Spring Conference 2017, where they launched ‘Finteract’, a platform to engage with the startup community. 

As a consequence of all the efforts, a number of organizations are coming forward to collaborate in making the project a success. MoUs have been signed with Visa and Thomson Reuters, for boosting the digital payments network. Singapore’s Lattice80, which is considered to be one of the world’s largest fintech hubs, has also signed a MoU with the state government to set up an incubator in Vizag. Four months after the International Institute of Digital Technologies (IIDT) was established at Tirupati, IT and networking giant Cisco and Kii Corporation of Japan have agreed to set up Centres of Excellence (CoE) on the new campus that is coming up on the periphery of Tirupati. While Kii Corporation’s CoE will focus on research and development on IoT-related applications, Cisco will build their CoE on Internet of Things, cyber security, and analytics.