Jio Financial Services launches beta version of JioFinance app

Jio Financial Services Ltd on Thursday launched the JioFinance app, a platform for daily finances and digital banking, in beta mode.

The app integrates digital banking, UPI transactions, bill settlements, insurance advisory, and offers a consolidated view of accounts and savings in one interface.

The JioFinance app aims to cater to users of all levels of familiarity with financial technology, ensuring effortless money management on finger-tips, Jio Financial Services says in a press statement.

The company’s future plans include expanding loan solutions, starting with loans on mutual funds and progressing to home loans.

The key features include instant digital account opening and “streamlined” bank management with the Jio payments bank account feature, the statement says.

The company says the beta launch of JioFinance will be used to invite user input for refinement.

"We're excited to introduce the 'JioFinance,' app to the market. A platform that shall aim to redefine the way individuals manage their finances today. Our end goal is to simplify everything related to finance in a single platform for any user across all demographics, with a comprehensive suite of offerings like lending, investment, insurance, payments & transactions and make financial services more transparent, affordable and intuitive," said a company spokesperson.

This comes on a day when banking regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) unveiled final guidelines for setting up a self-regulatory organisation for the fintech sector. Fintechs are defined as entities that provide technological solutions for delivery of financial products and services to businesses and consumers.

The self-regulatory organisation should operate objectively, with credibility and responsibility under the oversight of RBI, the banking regulator says. It should strive towards healthy and sustainable development of the fintech sector and, if necessary, identify a glide path to a phased regulatory or supervisory compliance, it says.

The SRO should ensure that it is truly representative of the fintech sector, including fintechs that are currently regulated by RBI such as NBFC-Account Aggregators, NBFC-Peer to Peer Lending Platforms, etc. but excluding banks, the central bank says.

The diverse nature of fintech businesses means they can often operate across various domains, according to RBI. “For example, some entities might aggregate both loan and insurance products, while RegTech providers develop solutions for a range of financial institutions including lending and insurance. Through comprehensive membership agreements that encompass a broad spectrum of industry players, the SRO-FT should gain the legitimacy and credibility to not only frame baseline standards and rules of conduct codes, but also effectively monitor and enforce them,” the regulator says.

“This representative structure should foster inclusivity and enable the SRO-FT to draw upon the collective expertise and experience of its members, resulting in development of standards that are pragmatic, adaptive, and widely accepted within the fintech community. The SRO-FT must thus be looked up to and accepted by the industry as the key body for setting standards, defining rules of conduct and ensuring voluntary adoption of the framework contours by its members,” it adds.