Thank you, Mr. Setty. That was for sharing your personal story as well as the gamut of pillars you highlighted for India's Vision 2047. Several questions came in as you were talking. I'm going to read out just a few that are related to things you mentioned. One common theme seems to be around the digital public infrastructure that has been built in India, and the questions are around how do you see the relationship between traditional banks, fintechs, and emerging technologies. You can't have a discussion today without AI. So how do you see fintech, emerging technologies, and banking coming together towards the vision?
So one of the things right at the outset I would like to mention on the AI story: I think everybody talking about India missing the AI story — there are no AI companies to invest, so the investor conference cannot not talk about AI adoption in India. But I think I'm a great believer that India would provide the largest use cases and the largest adoption of AI, and going to be the biggest beneficiary in the world. And the microcosm of that is of course the financial services sector. While it's very interesting to see that more than the financial sector today, the great amount of AI — when we are talking about AI, obviously we're not talking about merely conventional ML models, we're talking about GenAI, agentic AI. A large-scale adoption as we speak is happening in the healthcare sector and in the manufacturing sector. So which means that they're all aimed at increasing productivity, and I'm sure that the financial sector, including SBI — we were early adopters of conventional AI. We launched a product called pre-approved personal loan which was a big hit in terms of being completely driven by the ML model. We were also one of the first banks to adopt responsible AI even before the RBI came with AI guidelines. Responsible AI and ethical AI would be a cornerstone of financial services in India. But I personally believe that the AI adoption and the way the technology is adopted in India in the past will be primarily used to achieve efficiency of scale. Just to give an example, if we have 530 million customers, we have on one extreme 170 million customers who are financial inclusion customers who have started their journey with a zero balance in their accounts and 99% of them are savers today, and on the other extreme you have high net worth individuals, ultra-high net worth individuals. So how do you design your products using AI in terms of creating hyper-personalization models is something that is central to the whole technology and AI adoption in the banking sector.
Thank you, sir. And on a related note, we spoke a little bit about the high net worth and at the same time inclusion being a core part of the growth story. So again, some questions coming around that topic — how the growth is being led today by public spending and not by private spending, jobs are not increasing, AI will improve productivity but will diminish job openings, demographic dividend may become a burden. Any thoughts around that?
So a lot of capital investment across the globe have led to a great amount of automation. If you see, much of the capital investments — not only India, India is not unique. I think in other countries also, even the developing countries, it is seen that much of the manufacturing is automated. The amount of capital invested and the jobs created always is a disconnect across the globe. But India has uniquely a very strong services sector, and the services sector of course initially will be impacted by AI. But I believe — I was just giving an example — a lot of people said that in the IT jobs, for instance, the coding moving to AI, a lot of people will lose jobs. But in the IT sector, 99% of the workforce are engineers, and these are the people who can be reskilled in a short span of time. And I think we need a large number of skilled manpower to deploy AI itself. I think this is something what we are really facing in the market now — that while AI capital investments, everybody is ready, the availability of the manpower to deploy these AI tools is actually becoming a challenge. So how do you reskill and reorient your people? And time and again, India proved that they are capable of repivoting. We pivoted from a simple BPO to global capability centers today, world-class, and I have not seen anyone shying away from global capability centers setting up here in India. So I think the productivity gains would ensure that there is investment in areas which probably will create more jobs.
Thank you. And on a related subject, I think with every — globally what we are seeing around cryptocurrencies — where do you see that with the financial ecosystem as we know it?
So currently, I think both from a regulatory point of view as well as the government point of view, India is not focusing on crypto, but we are seriously focusing on the central bank digital currency, both in the retail segment as well as the wholesale segment. While CBDC definitely requires some kind of repurposing in the sense that in a very matured payment ecosystem, CBDC positioning as a payment mechanism is not going to work. So we are looking at, for example, a programmable CBDC, and for most of the direct benefit transfers where a specific purpose is intended, CBDC can be effectively deployed. So I think the focus seems to be more on the central bank digital currency at this moment than looking at other digital forms of currency.
Yeah. Thank you. So another theme that's coming out of the questions is more related to policy and ecosystem. And one interesting question here which says: Sir, if you had the privilege to become a member of the Ministry of Finance, what are the three key policy measures you would want to enact?
So in some way, without being part of the ministry anyway, we keep engaging ourselves with the policy-making, at least advisories. So broadly, I think if you have seen over the years, Indian government has been extremely positive towards development of the financial ecosystem. While they have general obligations in terms of maintaining and catering or satisfying all segments of the population, but central to this overall approach has been efficient fiscal management and a very proactive approach. I just would like to share an example. For instance, when this West Asian conflict came up, the first and foremost thing what we suggested to the government was that while it may not be as intense as COVID, but it's equally diversified in terms of its impact on the economy. And we said that the most vulnerable segment could be small and medium enterprises and businesses. So as a very proactive measure, they came with the ECLGS — you're all familiar, this emergency credit line — and as we see, a lot of businesses which are having some disruption in their businesses, they're able to access this liquidity. So broadly, I think the government is more focused on ensuring the stability of the economy, and they have strengthened over the years the banking system. Today the public sector banking system is so robust we are able to support the credit growth which is very significant now.
Thank you, sir. So you had spoken about a healthy pipeline of acquisitions or loan growth over the recent times. I think there are a few questions around which segments you are seeing this growth coming in, and your thoughts around manufacturing and the Make in India vision as well.
