‘UPI is an absolute game changer’

At the launch of the Dentsu-e4m Digital Advertising Report 2023, industry leaders came together for a very insightful panel discussion on the topic, India digital stack for technology and creativity in the new digital economy

The panel had Gagan Singla, MD, blinkX by JM Financial; Prasad Pimple, Executive Vice President & Head of Digital Business Unit, Kotak Life; Medhavi Singh, Head of Enterprise - India, Criteo; and Abhijit Shah, Senior Vice President, ICICI Prudential. Rashmi Sethi, Chief Strategy Officer, Fractal Ink, a Merkle company, moderated the session.

Sethi started the session asking about the success of stack adoption and its penetration in India and globally.

Shah said, "The largest game changer for us in the industry, especially mutual funds, has been the whole digital onboarding that India stack provides. Opening a mutual funds account used to be a tedious process. But aadhar-based e-KYC works really well. Within a few seconds you can get onboard."

Prasad added, "From the perspective of any BFSI company, not just the e-KYC solution but the UPI payment and the entire ecosystem of payment gateways have changed. We all have been doing digital business for almost 15 years now, but the ease with which the customer can complete the journey online today has tremendously changed with the advent of e-KYC, c-KYC plus UPI as a payment gateway. I would say everything what we are experiencing today is helping us build that ecosystem stronger from the customer perspective."

Singla mentioned, "When digilocker came, it was something beyond imagination. I thought it is not going to work, but the way it has helped us in the e-KYC version-2 is great. The way we have used UPI has a huge value to us. For us, it is direct revenue value because in investments, with the UPI coming in the way, the customer is able to transfer the funds at the moment they buy a stock. We are able to engage with customers with UPI much better. We have leveraged UPI a lot and it has given us the ROI.”

Singh shared that Aadhar has really paved the way, but UPI was an absolute game changer. “UPI really changed the way the digital payments were happening. On one end, there is the government that is ensuring people become more and more account holders, and the other hand, there are fintech firms who are ensuring that people who do not have a bank account are able to seamlessly do digital payments. COVID accelerated the scenario,” he added.

Panelists also discussed about the unique value propositions of web-3 which enable India to lead on this front.

Singh said, "e-commerce is a huge opportunity. Also, with 5G penetration, media will also grow. There are already so many OTT platforms and they are constantly growing. Now we are hearing about the regional ones that are catering to local dialects that will actually involve the masses. So, each of those industry are seeing those opportunities that is going to change and that is primarily based on Indian Stack, because a large part of them is driven by or a tleast increasing by UPI, ONDC and 5G technologies".

Pimple added to that, "A lot of tools are available today and are fragmented but what web 3.0 can do is seamlessly build them into the discovery purchase and ongoing engagement journeys of customers with their investments".

Sethi concluded the panel discussion by saying, "To summarise the trends that we are seeing in emerging future are customer convenience, digital transactions, evolution of e-commerce,D2C, experiential marketing form, basically web 3 and extended reality and these centralise local commerce which are more hyper local".