Headquartered in the U.S., Metlife is world's leading life insurance company providing annuities, employee benefits, and asset management too. Operating in more than 50 countries, the entity serves approximately 100 million customers across the globe.

India's identity as a tech hub and start-up leader is the stuff of legend at this point but this legend is grounded in hard data. India's 4,200 startups in 2015 put us in third place globally, behind only the U.S. and UK. Along with being a key driver of India's economic growth, our technology sector holds the promise to solve some of our nations and the world's most urgent social and development challenges. One of those is financial inclusion.

While the upper class may take financial services like bank accounts, credit cards, savings, loans, deposits, and payments for granted to manage their lives, it is hard for many to imagine what life would be like if these services were gone. So, consider the lengths to which someone like Seema must go just to manage her daily financial life.

Seema is a rural woman who relies on cash benefits from the state to make ends meet. Even for someone who wasn't six months pregnant, as Seema was when I first met her. It would be impractical to walk seven kilometers the distance to the nearest bank branch every time she needed to deposit or withdraw money. So, Seema and hundreds of millions of low-income Indians like her hide cash at home, borrow from equally stressed family and friends or from moneylenders in emergencies and spend hours standing in lines to pay bills in cash.

Fintech is a major, realistic step in solving this problem on a meaningful scale. Even amongst low-income Indians, mobile phone penetration is significant. Our 1.25 billion people already have more than 900 million mobile phones, and we are expected to add 300-400 million new smartphone users just in the next two to three years. While mobile banking makes life easier for the already-banked professional classes, for people like Seema, it can be life-changing. If her bank is suddenly as close as the phone in her pocket, she can receive her cash benefits digitally right into a mobile-enabled account, avoiding the delay and stress of walking to and waiting at the government office, where she may fear being pressured to pay an opaque fee. And, instead of cashing out the entire benefit, she can withdraw part of that amount from a local mobile money agent. Or, she might purchase groceries from him with part of her mobile money and save the remainder on her mobile money account where it is out of sight and safe from thieves and even family, friends, and her.