Written by Molly Ziskind
As a Product and Market Development Intern at FinBox in Bengaluru, I spent my summer developing market entry strategies for FinBox’s products and solutions.
I remember the night before my first day in the office. As a Princeton Economics student, I was excited to put what I had learned in the classroom into practice at a growing fintech start-up. I spent time reading through FinBox’s website and blogs, taking notes on each product.
When I came into the office for my first day, I quickly realized that my understanding of these products was incomplete, despite my preparation.
My first task was to research the lending ecosystem in India. Coming from the United States, I naturally began comparing the two. As I learned how India’s financial system had developed, I began to notice important differences in how lending works across the two markets. For example, I learned that borrowers’ motivations can differ significantly. In India, I encountered more lending tied to specific life events, while in the US, asset-based borrowing in the form of mortgages and auto loans is more common. I began to understand how Finbox’s products addressed unique aspects of India’s financial system and why those products mattered to their users.
It seems obvious to me now, but financial products do not exist independently of the local markets and infrastructure around them. They are often designed to address gaps within that infrastructure and to solve problems in that market.
I began to look at FinBox's products differently. I was no longer asking only, “What does this product do?” I was asking, “What makes this product possible?” And, “What problem does it solve in the lives of its users?”
For example, India's Account Aggregator framework, creates a consent-based infrastructure for individuals to share their financial information between institutions. FinBox's BankConnect, uses Account Aggregator to access a borrower's bank statement data and then analyzes and enriches that information for lenders. Instead of requiring a borrower to manually collect and submit financial documents, the underlying infrastructure can make that information available digitally and securely, while FinBox's technology turns the resulting data into insights that can support underwriting.
As the summer went on, my work expanded into analyzing competitors, researching regulations and pricing strategies, generating leads, and developing international go-to-market strategies. The more I learned about different financial institutions and market segments, the more I saw how much context matters when evaluating whether a product can succeed in a new market.
At first, I felt discouraged by the challenge of launching a product developed within one financial ecosystem into another. A product built around the infrastructure of one country cannot automatically fulfill the needs of another when digital infrastructure, regulations, institutions, and consumer behavior differ. After discussing these ideas with my talented FinBox colleagues, I realized that this was the whole point. My teammates explained how FinBox has the capacity to adapt their products to the infrastructure, constraints, and unique dynamics of a new market. The objective was never to simply transplant a product unchanged. It was to understand the market well enough to determine where the technology could create value within it and how the products can be adapted to suit the market.
This conversation changed how I thought about market development. I came to FinBox thinking I needed to understand its products. I eventually realized that to understand a product, I needed to understand the problem it was solving, the market in which it operated, and the infrastructure that made that solution possible. Working in India and at FinBox gave me the opportunity to see those connections from a perspective I could not have developed by studying another market from the outside or by working only within the system I already knew.
