From cryptocurrencies to unicorn IPOs, personal finance and money themes that turned out to be duds

The year 2022 is all set to culminate in a few days. There are no prizes for guessing that it was riddled with crests and troughs. There were glad tidings along with the traces of gloom.

As one can recall when the world’s economy had started to limp back to normality after two long years of pandemic, Russia started a full-blown war on Ukraine on February 24, dashing the hopes of economic recovery by optimists and pessimists alike. The war pushed the can of economic progress further down the road, leaving everyone — from analysts to lay investors — flabbergasted.

This ensued worries over surge in inflation, jump in oil prices, rise in interest rates, significant drop in IT stock prices, so on and so forth.

Here, we give the lowdown on some of the key themes of this year that were anticipated to take off well, but the fate had something else in store:

Fintech lending: For past couple of years, financial technology — popularly known as fintech — and particularly lending is projected as one of the key themes to watch out for. Earlier this year, buy now pay later (BNPL) schemes started to get quite popular with online platforms such as Amazon and Uber. But the banking regulator’s notification in June put an end to all this.

The RBI released a circular that time which practically banned non-banking companies from loading prepaid instruments such as cards using credit lines.

Then in September, RBI came up a set of guidelines for digital lending, thus preventing the apps…

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