‘BFSI is adopting digital at a fast pace’

The banking sector is adopting digital at a fast pace to expand its reach and satisfy customers with personalised communication and help them with decision making, banking experts said at the recently held #Pitch BFSI Marketing Summit.

During a panel discussion on ‘Leveraging Digitization in BFSI Marketing’, chaired by Siddharth Dabhade, Managing Director, MiQ, panellists dived deep into the vitality of digital to understand the GenZ customers and more.

Jahid Ahmed, Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Acquisition/ Website/ Content & Social Media Marketing- HDFC Bank, said that his bank is leveraging digital by using influencer marketing and YouTube, which has come up in terms of “share of voice.”

He said that his bank is also focused on providing not just financial products but financial literacy to the customers through digital channels in order to compete with the new-age banks.

“The change will not come by just talking about it. It has to come from the touch, the feel, and the overall ethos of the bank. The financial literacy in this country is hardly 24%. The first agenda is how to handhold people in terms of financial education. Once you start growing with the whole culture of managing money, our bank wants to be there with customers in their decision-making when it comes to their passion points.

“Apart from literacy, content is not restricted to articles or videos only. We need to understand where GenZ is spending time. Each platform has their own native advantages,” Ahmed said.

Azmat Habibulla, Chief Marketing Officer, South Indian Bank, was of the view that BFSI is an industry which has adopted digital at the fastest pace and all the digital channels are in good use in the BFSI sector.

“Each has its pros and cons. What worked for us and is significant in banking is that our journey with the customer starts from the opening of an account and unlike other industries, it does not end with the purchase but begins with that.

“Customer is profitable for us when he/she transacts with us. People have multiple bank accounts now but our endeavour is to make our bank primary for them. For that, automated triggers powered by AI are important. Customers’ behavioural input and transactional inputs are analysed and then triggers are posted. So a customer gets very personalised communication,” Habibulla said.

Rathin Lahiri, Head of Marketing & CSR, SBI General Insurance, too said that the industry is growing very rapidly.

“If you take a certain category of customers who are actually transacting, they are all digital. For financial services today, almost 100% of transactions are digital. Over the last 3-4 years and largely because of Aadhar and UPI, India today, is digitally an absolute first-world country and is actually ahead of several European countries,” Lahiri said.

He added that India is a young nation with a median age of 31 years, so as a result of that, the adoption of new technologies is very high.

“The fact that today smartphone penetration and that of Whatsapp for communication and transaction is very high, means it is easier for you to reach out to customers and vice-versa. This has laid the seeds for faster growth, adoption, lower costs and therefore, higher profitability for customers,” he said.

According to Pulkit Narayan, CEO, Dangle Ads, the way the BFSI sector has adapted to the digital ecosystem (social media, mobile, content, video) is commendable.

“They are communicating with people through social media, videos and customers can also get support there itself,” he said while highlighting how the BFSI sector is making the most of the digital world.

Also on the panel was Sarvesh Bagla, CEO, Techmagnate, who threw light on how the search volumes for lending, insurance or investments have gone through the roof in the last 3-5 years.

“If you look at the set of keywords that represent personal loan as an industry, the search volume has gone up by 46% over the last three years. Gold loan has increased by 1460%. Health insurance has grown by 45 %. Fixed deposits have grown by 100 % in two years.

“Not just financial products but demand for financial literacy has increased as consumers are doing a lot of research online. If you consistently show up in organic search results, it goes a long way towards establishing trust with your brand. So the ones who recognise the potential of organic and have invested in Enterprise SEO, optimising for thousands of keywords which actually drive a ton of traffic,” said Bagla.