‘Tier 2 and 3 consumers are significant in digital banking space’
Kotak Mahindra Bank's Srikrishna Moorthy spoke about how Bharat has adapted to digital banking in a fireside chat with Mobavenue's Ishank Joshi at the Pitch BFSI Marketing Summit
The penetration of smartphones and the evolving digitization system in the country has helped the BFSI sector reach different corners of the country. Shedding light on the topic ‘Next-Gen Digital Marketing & Digital Banking for Bharath’ in a fireside chat were Ishank Joshi, Co-founder and CEO of Mobavenue and Srikrishna Moorthy, Executive VP, Kotak Mahindra Bank at Pitch BFSI Marketing Summit held in Mumbai on Tuesday.
The discussion revolved around the digitization model that has helped the financial sector to provide services to customers in tier 2, tier 3 cities, and even rural India. They also spoke about tailoring customer experience for vernacular-speaking users in digital banking.
Speaking about the ease at which consumers in different corners of the country are using digital to do transactions, Moorthy says, “A lot of the social media apps and others have started creating a comfort level for the consumer, so they started moving to the mobile banking app, and the comfort level of paying digitally has picked up significantly. In fact, during COVID, that’s the race we have seen. The digital penetration moved up significantly.
"The digital consumers are significant. They may have very minimalistic ways but they are one level above digital. They want the UI UX experience and they come back with the feedback. That way, tier 2, and tier 3 are also all about vernacular language, so they work well.”
Moorthy also spoke about how they incorporate native language into their ads to attract hard-to-reach customers. “So when we show an ad and if it is very clear that the segment is vernacular, we show them in their native language. So to start with, not every language but some language, Hindi for sure.
"We have built a customer experience for this cohort of consumers and they are happy. I am not saying they are very large at this moment, but it’s close to double-digit number.”
Moorthy also spoke about moving from traditional KYC to digital KYC and more. Speaking about the growth they expect from this sector in India, Moorthy said, “Broadly, I can say it’s like a whooping wave, and it is happening more often than what we expected. Consumers at midnight are doing huge transactions, and not small ticket sizes but two lakh rupees and upwards. We can say there’s another wave happening in this sector.”
