Ladies and gentlemen, on that note, let's head towards our next session. And trust me, we've been waiting for this one to start. And it is now time for us to bring in our speakers on the same. First of all, our moderator of this conversation, Mr. Retesh Shukla, CEO, NPCI International Payments Limited. [Applause] May I now call upon our speakers Mr. Abujit Singh, Group Head, Digital Ecosystems and International Banking, HDFC Bank. [Music] I'd now like to urge the welcome of Mr. Rama Mohan Rao Amara, Managing Director, State Bank of India. [Applause] [Music] I now like to welcome Miss Susan Ker, the President Global Markets of PayPal. [Music] And ladies and gentlemen, welcoming on stage Mr. Vikas Bunel, CEO, Amazon Pay India. [Music] May I now request all our panelists to please take seat and with that requesting Mr. Shukla to take forward with the conversation.
That's such a power packed panel. I hope this stage doesn't give up to gravity for next 30 minutes. So a very warm welcome to all of you. I think we have a packed house, lot of key news. So let me not waste any more time. Let me start, Mr. Rao, I'll start with you. I think SBI has made a lot of headlines recently. You have started an innovation hub with EPICS in Singapore. In terms of your long-term strategy, how do you see State Bank of India leveraging this particular partnership and how do you see this create opportunities in the international payments domain?
Thank you, Retesh, and good afternoon everyone. Good afternoon my fellow panelists. I would like to try to split that question into three parts: some brief introduction about SBI to appreciate the role we play in the industry as well as payments, before I jump into the innovation piece, and then how we are doing in international and global payments. All of you are aware State Bank of India is the largest bank in India with 520 million customers across the spectrum, from HNI customers to bottom of the pyramid customers, and with a physical presence across 23,000 branches, 70,000 ATMs, and around another 80,000 business correspondents and customer service points. Besides that, we also have a very robust presence in internet banking and mobile banking. In our mobile banking app, we have around 90 million registrations, with almost 20-25% of those customers being quite active. Of course, there is a lot of expectation from stakeholders to do our bit in terms of financial inclusion, be it micro loans or cross-selling micro insurance or micro pension, etc. Given this broad spectrum of customers and the products and services we cater to, we constantly look at innovation to transform business processes, whether it is customer onboarding, loans and advances, or deposits. Payments comes naturally to us, and that is the reason why last year we partnered with EPICS Singapore to create a secured sandbox environment where we want to throw problem statements, give them use case or innovation challenges, work with them closely, and collaborate on co-creating solutions. This has worked well. Initially it took time to stabilize, but we have already onboarded around 50 plus fintechs catering to variety of services, plus around 250 APIs we have exposed. With the help of this, we were able to reimagine processes all across, whether it is customer onboarding or instant digital loans, retail or MSME, etc. Coming to international payments, we also have a role to play with our physical presence across 29 countries and 245 physical touch points outside India. We are one of the largest channelizers for the remittances the country receives, and all of you are aware India is the largest recipient of inward remittances. Our share accounts for roughly 20% of remittances received. This gives us a bird's eye view and we know who are the players to partner with. We are very happy to partner with NIPL, NPCI International Private Limited, in terms of your drive to internationalize UPI. We are always there in those corridors where you have able to strike agreements with respect to payment authorities, and we continuously work with other payment players. I think even PayPal as well recently, only yesterday I think they launched an initiative with NPCI in terms of three countries. We are also there. We are also one of those partners facilitating that while you have struck that agreement, we enable it. We are a minor partner in that initiative where Indian travelers using their UPI app can actually make payments at merchants very effortlessly. Innovation and collaboration with fintechs comes naturally to us, and true to our size and expectations, we would like to play a good role in the global payment space.
Thank you. And you talked about internationalization of UPI and you mentioned PayPal. So Susan, I'll come to you next. PayPal traditionally was known as a closed loop system. Now you're pivoting towards creating PayPal World, which is being perceived as an open interoperable system. What's the strategy thought process here? How do you see it adding to evolution of global payment ecosystem? I think we would love to hear from you on that.
Thank you and thanks for having us on the panel. Similarly, really great to meet my fellow panelists. So by context, I think it's good to start with what is PayPal and then I'll answer your question directly, Retesh. For those that don't know, PayPal is a large global payment enabler with multiple businesses under it, from processing to how payments happen on a branded basis, and then multiple services under each of those. We do business in over nearly 200 countries and territories. We do about more than 30 billion in revenue. Over two-thirds of our business is done through some form of partnership or distribution partnership, and the business is growing well on many fronts. A few things as we've thought more about who PayPal needs to be around the world, a few things are true now. First, if you look at our business, we've focused a lot on how we solve the needs of our customers by working customer back. And what's true about customer needs around the world is whether it's simplicity and ease. What's consistently true about simplicity and ease is you can't do that without security, privacy, and trust. And I think we've earned the right to be a trusted brand around the world because a lot of that work comes through partnerships. And if you look at the ecosystems of partners who we've worked with traditionally, those partners range from financial institutions, large global networks, large domestic networks, regulators, and of course a plethora of other processors, partners, system integrators, etc. All of that has helped us understand what it's like to orchestrate business around the world. And that orchestration has come to a natural point now as we think more about growth. And PayPal World is a great example of extending that orchestration because what it allows us to do now is to take PayPal into a more set of open ecosystems in thinking about where PayPal World goes. And we really appreciate the partnership with you, Retesh. I think it was great yesterday to have you and Alex on stage celebrating the launch of the first global partnership and we hope to do much more together. In thinking through where that partnership goes, we feel strongly about this right to earn trust and to bring trust into this much broader ecosystem, but we also feel really good about the fact that we've learned a lot about how to do orchestration working in both private and public sector. And if you look at the example of things that we're doing around the world, it ranges from the work we've done with the Monetary Authority of Singapore most recently on how we think differently about the rules and regulations that front things like crypto, the work we've done with the FSB on thinking about the governance of payment orchestrators and payment processes in the cross-border framework, the work we've done here with most of your teams and many teams across the Reserve Bank on the launch of the payment aggregator model for cross-border and various other examples of collaboration between public and private sector to ensure that trust is the underlying throughput for how we make cross-border payments work. As a company, our intention is to take that same framework into this larger orchestration of cross-border payments. And so, PayPal World will be our first example of opening up the ecosystem, bringing partners who are backed by large regulators, large processing frameworks, large banks like SBI, HDFC, ICICI, and so on. And we're very excited about what that does to not just speed up innovation because each partner will bring some of their innovations to the forefront, but how we do it compliantly, transparently, consistently around the world and perhaps how we broker standards in this world of cross-border that don't really exist in a consistent way today. So we're very excited about where the future goes.
Thank you, Susan, and thanks for the opportunity to partner with PayPal World. I think we're very excited here not only in NPCI but in India. Now coming to you, Vikas, Susan talked about trust, simplicity, and I think HDFC has created a beautiful business which is one of the largest in payment space. I just wanted to understand how the bank is looking in terms of partnerships with fintechs to not only reinforce the interoperability that today exists in India but how to bring scale and make it more sustainable. What are your thoughts around that?
Sure, thank you so much for inviting us to this panel and good afternoon to all of you. Like SBI is the largest public sector bank, HDFC is the largest private sector bank in the country, and when we look at this whole area of fintech and bank partnership, we've started a separate area called banking as a service, which me and my team are working on for about a year and a half now. What I see in India is a few very foundational things: one is a very young population, and fintech adoption is probably the highest in the world, more than the global average. The second piece is that unlike organizations where departments can't see each other's data, fortunately for the country that hasn't happened, so the technology, the way regulator and technology have interacted, there's hardly any silo, giving a great collaboration between regulator and technology, which gives a huge foundation to take things forward. In our business, payments and banking is a trust-based, scale business, compliance business, so between partners there's a beautiful collaboration where we look at compliance, trust at scale, and from the partner we get understanding of user experience on different platforms and their user base. Banking or payments have similar propositions, but what matters is when we put it in a particular platform, how do you package it, contextualize it, and present it to the person who needs that product at that time. We are making steps into seeing how banking can become invisible. Typically, when you have to pay, we want to come to that point where it's completely invisible and you don't understand what's happening. A classical example could be what you see on Amazon when buying an iPhone: you don't see the price, you see the EMI first. How can we build experiences like that is what we're working on.
Thank you very much. So now from largest private sector bank to largest retailer in India, Vikas, great having you on stage. And Amazon, I think everyone here in the room must be using it at least once every couple of days. There's no need to describe what Amazon is, but let's talk about Amazon Pay. I think you are driving it, and as such a powerful brand, Amazon is. How do you see Amazon Pay evolve in that space not only domestically but also internationally to enable payments on some of the rails that we are creating with partners like PayPal and others? Just wanted to hear your thoughts, strategy, some long-term vision around it.
So first of all, thank you. It's really my pleasure to be here. Amazon Pay, just to set this, as my fellow panelists talked about, our mission is really simple: in payments and financial services, how do we make it very convenient, trusted, and rewarding for our customers? Trust is really the backbone of everything we do because we are in the business of taking money for customers. Trust is paramount, and on top of it, convenience is really important, super critical. It's about how do we make things fast, simple, and failure-free. When we started accepting payments on Amazon to what it is today, customers can use it everywhere. I remember back, almost one in two payments used to fail, it was that bad, and to a point where it's less than 1 in 10. Still, I want to get to less than 1 in 20 or 1 in 50, but we've come a long way in simplifying experience for our customers. We recently launched something like a wallet where customers in India have multiple payment methods, and you can access that very simply. But not only that, when making any kind of payment, whether on Amazon or outside, we work harder to show you which one has the best offer or best experience. You don't have to work harder, we will do that work for you. Similar thing on rewards. I'll give another example: when we started our credit program, one of the biggest insights was that credit cards are very complicated for customers in India; they didn't understand what they were getting or how to use it. We said, can we make it very simple so that it's just about whatever it is, no limits, no caps, it automatically comes to you in your account. Simple insights helped us get the love of our customers. The point is, keep things simple, convenient, and rewarding. To your question on how we drive, the biggest insight is getting the customer's attention at the moment of truth. Nobody wakes up saying they want to make a payment or get a credit card; they wake up to live their life. If I can get them in the journey and help solve their need, it's really powerful. For example, today customers on any of our merchants, they're on Amazon trying to buy a washing machine, and if I can give them contextually a product which is better for that purchase and give better discounts, better experience, it's the moment of truth. On installments, majority of our customers are acquired contextually, more than 50% or even higher, for that journey and experience. So the strategy is to do basic things really well, and when you do that, you get the customer at the moment of truth, acquire them, and deeply engage them on that experience. To your second point about internationally, interoperability matters. It is extremely important. Today, the most interoperable payment method is cash; you can use it everywhere, but there are problems: you have to carry it, convert it to the country you're in, etc. For us, how can we make it connect so that it becomes very important and interoperable, so customers can just use it because ubiquity is table stakes. We've done a lot of work: we were one of the first to say let's expand the wallet on UPI and launch it so that it becomes available everywhere. Similarly, because of our unique global footprint, we understand their needs and how we can serve them for shopping globally, traveling, etc., providing the same experience domestically to internationally. That's the thought process. To me, interoperability is at the heart of it, and all the work that you and the team are doing is what's going to really take us to the next level of growth from here.
