The Silicon Review ^Asia

The current environment for startups in India seems quite good as financial sector regulators put in efforts to help startups by enabling easy access to data and systems available. While the RBI introduced a regulatory sandbox that could help startups test new financial products in real time, IRDAI and Sebi have taken similar initiatives recently.Mentioning the regulatory sandbox approach by RBI, IRDAI said that it will allow fintechs to have a safe and conducive space to experiment so that the consequences of failure can be contained and growth of the fintech space can be boosted.

IRDAI will also be loosening up some of its regulatory frameworks based on the solutions fintechs come up with to accommodate new innovations. Sebi too has come up with a sandbox that creates a platform where startups can test their proposed solutions in isolation from the live market. According to a statement made by Sebi, the sandbox allows access to securities market related data and that’s what the most critical part is. The data sets contain data relating to KYC, holding data, and transactions data like order and trade log.

There are a certain set of guidelines that govern the use of these sandboxes. In case of IRDAI sandbox, the applicant should be worth Rs 10 lakh and have a standing of one financial year, and for Sebi, it’s just applicants who have a genuine need for testing solution. Moreover, the applicants need to show that testing in a sandbox environment is important for their solutions and without it they cannot develop properly.