Chief Information Officer & Group Head of IT, HDFC Bank

Payments Business, Tech & Digital | Mr. Parag Rao, Mr. Anjani Rathor, Mr. Ramesh Lakshminarayanan

🎥 Jun 03, 2022 📺 HDFCBank ⏱ 61m

About Ramesh Lakshminarayanan

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO and Group Head of IT at HDFC Bank, has discussed the bank's digital transformation and customer engagement strategy in recent appearances. In a June 2025 conversation, he stated that the bank's digital acquisition rate is upwards of 95-96%, with payment-related servicing at 97-98%. He noted that overall digital servicing stands at about 80% and said the bank aims to raise that figure to 90-95%. Lakshminarayanan emphasized that digital banking includes both assisted and unassisted modes, comparing the process to a security guard helping a first-time ATM user or a granddaughter teaching a grandfather to use a mobile app. He also said that user experience must be designed for both urban and rural customers, cautioning that a "very good looking app" may not suit a rural user. In a 2022 discussion, Lakshminarayanan described the bank's technology modernization efforts, including rebuilding and rewriting its mobile app using new tech stacks such as Golang and partnering with firms like Google and Aerospike. He said the bank signed an agreement with Microsoft to build a large enterprise data lake on Azure, which he described as the foundation for analytics and personalization. Lakshminarayanan characterized the bank's data strategy as moving from monolithic on-premises data warehouses to cloud data lakes, followed by API-fication and an AI/ML overlay, which he called the "holy grail." He also noted that the bank is modernizing its existing stack while simultaneously building new digital platforms on a completely new architecture.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Ramesh Lakshminarayanan's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (28 segments)

Unknown0:11

Yeah. In case any of you have any questions for Parag Anjani or Ramesh, if you could raise your hand, we'll make sure the mic reaches you, or we'll directly take you to demo one of the two.

Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, at the right, right back. Hi, hi.

So, if you could talk a little bit about the customer experience on some of the interfaces like the app and so on. Historically, we've had issues and so on. At this point in time, could you walk us through what are the fundamental changes we're making to make sure that our consumer experience is as good as some of the newer digital players or fintechs and so on? Thanks.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan1:20

Okay, thanks. So let me put it from a product point of view. If you see, from a customer selection and a distribution channel point of view, I think the bank has always been sort of up ahead in terms of addressing customer needs in segments, etc., with conventional banking products across the length and breadth of retail and wholesale. And that's been a strength; that's what has led the bank to be what we are today after 27 years of existence. With the emergence of the digital, if you also make do-it-yourself, many of the apps who work only purely in the digital world... That being true, we clearly said that's an area we need to build up on, but that alone is not enough in the new digital world. There are added dimensions to our larger transformation: UI/UX, customer experience, looking at user journeys, making them simpler, focusing on do-it-yourself (unassisted journeys), and also, in an India-type scenario, the unassisted journey is also available because not everyone can and will be comfortable with just doing everything yourself. That was one layer of experience and change which is part of our transformation. We're an extremely large bank as part of the ecosystem, number one in most of the products we choose to be in. The scale of transactions, throughput, and interactions we go through are clearly number one on an unweighted average. Anywhere between 20-25% of the transactions of the larger economy flow through our network. So what was important from a digital perspective is not just the UI/UX but also ensuring that the infrastructure is capable of taking that scale. UPI is an example, the kind of retail asset dispersal transactions, the card volume transactions on both the issuing and acceptance side, are in the digital stacks we're working on. So that's the second and very important bit of our transformation journey. The third bit, obviously, is that given our stature and status in the industry, we had to significantly strengthen the network and security of transactions, given that while we had done quite a lot in the conventional world, the digital era has brought different forms, types, and velocities of fraud risk, operational risk, etc., in a much more holistic manner. These are the three levels in which we've clearly invested, and our transformation journey is a sliver of all three.

The fact is that we're a running bank. All the infrastructure, capabilities, distribution assets, and customer franchise we built have obviously taken us to the success levels and stature we are today. All of that is great, but with changing times, what has changed essentially is the environment. Customer needs and their need to interact with their principles have clearly changed in terms of the ways they want to interact. Digital is a clear phenomenon of that. The second bit is that demand, consumption, or transactions have also grown up in multiple scales, driven a lot by fintech and new players getting into each category. So given that, we are also building new digital platforms which are a ground-up approach on a completely new architecture. We've adopted that strategy in our part of our transformation. So if you look at it as a matrix, we looked at scale, UI/UX, scale capacity, risk and security, and on this side, modernizing the stack and building new incremental capabilities. That's the matrix of the transformation we've gone through. Therefore, as you see, UI/UX is one subset of that whole transformation journey, an important subset because that's what you and I as customers also see, feel, and experience. I'll now talk about it. That was just a sort of run-up, and Anjani can talk a little more about the specifics.

That is again critical because just changing the UI/UX is not enough. There are constant parts for each and every product journey which have been reimagined in the UI/UX space. I'll just talk about the kind of progression. We've brought in a lot of internal help and professional life to change this, but what you'll see, I'll give you three or four examples of completely revamped and changed UI/UX which will only aid our growth in the digital space. Some of the demos you will see soon: PayZapp 2.0. We had PayZapp 1.0, and feedback was exactly the same: UI/UX not completely comprehensive. It now has a set of payment options for a customer and a mobile commerce platform built into that, with SmartBuy built into the PayZapp app. The third is completely built on a new digital, ground-up, cloud-ready, cloud-native, containerized stack, which factors in nimble, agile product changes on the fly and scalability at the front. So you'll see PayZapp 2.0, and we'll take you through a demo of one aspect of the kind of UI/UX that has been designed to take into account current means and also benchmark to competition. SmartHub, VPR 2.0... and the UI/UX was just that. 2.0 has been once again reimagined to ensure it's a one-app platform solution, plug-and-play for merchants, which allows two or three things. In short, all payment forms in a box: the merchant can accept any form of payment a customer chooses to pay by, completely interoperable. The SmartHub VPR app can scan a Paytm QR or a GPA QR and still initiate a payment. It accepts cards, remote payments, wallet payments, all interoperable, and the UI/UX changes accordingly. It offers the merchant, because the bulk of merchants will also be either potential bank customers or existing bank customers, the ability to get the liability relationship, use the velocity of transactions and the balances the merchant displays, and therefore underwrite for loans. Small-ticket, small-tenure loans like Dukandar loans, business loans, card loans, loan on card, etc., are all available as a pre-approved offer inside the app, single-click money into the account type of products. The fourth is giving him productivity tools which will help him enhance his business: how can he display his product on Facebook, send a link to you remotely, and collect payment, so on and so forth. The UI/UX will reflect all of these changes in a completely contemporary manner.

Our 24x7, 360-degree customer servicing platform. In the conventional world, call center, standalone email, standalone SMS, standalone... this is a completely digital, omnipresent channel which allows the customer to access queries, questions, complaints, etc., through one digital interface, with UI/UX being an important part of this whole thing. It allows him to carry forward his interactions seamlessly across any channel, just as much as you see in Netflix: you can start a journey on a mobile and then continue on your iPad or laptop seamlessly. And to the back-end agent who responds, he gets a one-view of the customer. This is given to us in partnership with Adobe, called Forms, which gives us the flexibility to change those UI/UXs on the fly. Anjani will talk a little more about that and probably demo you on that as well. But that's our approach to these three apps I talked about. Fundamentally, the same approach we've applied across all customer-facing applications. I hope that answers your question.

Unknown12:41

Quick follow-up on that. Very exciting to hear this, both as a customer and an investor.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan12:48

You'll see it also, by the way. And he will talk about when the customers will also see it.

Unknown13:11

Sure. PayZapp 1.0, with all its flaws, is hardly present on the checkout of most e-commerce apps as a specific checkout. For that, once you launch it, you'll have to spend a little money and get into that checkout, maybe even offer discounts to promote the use of these apps, and with your user base, it will probably catch on. So is that part of the strategy? I'll give you another example: about six or seven years ago, you had a unified POS machine where you could pay by your phone, your card, multiple ways. It was hardly ever evangelized. Pine Labs now is talking about it, but you had it, it was your own machine. What is your strategy in evangelizing this, making sure they get taken on? Are you prepared to spend initially for the first year or two to speed up the adoption of these apps, and then with your customer base, it should take off fairly well?

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan14:30

Okay, so I'll break up the answer to your question in two parts. One is, yes, I admit probably we've not been in the face in terms of advertising, as you call it. Many of the changes, new product launches, improvements, etc., we've done. The fundamental belief is that when we directly reach out to customers, a lot of that experience is what he fails to see. But going forward, with properties like PayZapp, which are hardcore consumer apps, and properties like SmartHub or our Auto Express, we will be going aggressively to the marketplace, which is a combination of above-the-line and below-the-line. We will still be up there as the hero in terms of front page? Maybe not. But we'll definitely ensure that through digital and other physical means, we'll be there. That's the change we clearly needed. Admittedly so. Coming to your second point about the relevant type of features being there: you said PayZapp is not accepted in many merchants. Once again, yes, that was a clear weakness. The way we've addressed it now, and even more deeply so than what we had in the top one, the PayZapp still has the wallet, it has UPI, clearly with a similar experience as GPA. When you test out the product, you'll see it has tap and pay. I can take the mobile, tap it on an NFC-enabled POS machine, and pay in physical stores. And of course, it reads all QR codes in the marketplace. So there are multiple ways and means in which I can pay. Our leveraging at the ground level and all that work is actually happening. It will leverage HDFC Bank's very vast acceptance system, but because it's also an interoperable system, it will be accepted at all POS machines. I take your point about the DigiPOS which we had launched. We have a significant amount of digital transactions already on that as well. But yes, I admit to your point: we've not probably touted it or talked about it. That's something we want to address going forward. I hope I answered your question.

Unknown17:28

I just want to take a little more point, one point that I missed out, if I can come in.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan17:32

Yeah, but I just wanted to respond, if that's okay.

Unknown17:36

Sorry, on the audible, you're already... yes, yes, okay. I don't need to. So I think one of the things that you spoke about on the checkouts on the payment gateway, because it's a very important part of the growth hacking that you do, right? So what are you going to see in PayZapp 2.0? It's a swipe and pay, no biometric, no this, everything is combined into one. A lot of focus has gone into growth hacking. Just to give a little more perspective, because that's where we're learning from the fintech world: it's not about just putting the app, it's also about putting it in the right place at the right time and the right way. So there's a lot of work that's gone in, and you will see that actually in the demo. We'll show you how we're looking at that simple swipe and pay option coming through. So one is just building the product, and then distributing the product digitally in a way that it gets adopted. A lot of thoughts have gone in this time. In a post-tokenization world, even PayZapp 1.0 is a pretty powerful product. If I have my card stored on PayZapp, and by the way, I already can store a Citibank card on my PayZapp, in a post-tokenization world, it's a very powerful product. So if you strike a deal with the payment gateway and install that, that aggression has been missing from HDFC Bank, despite having pretty decent digital products which somehow are not as visible as they have been. So I just want to understand: is that mindset changing? Because this involves costs. You have to strike a deal with the payment gateway to get your checkout right up there. So I'm trying to find out whether the mindset is changing in terms of evangelizing your product.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan19:48

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you will see that. We'll show you how we're thinking of these assets getting distributed. Doing that in the digital world even more so. Customer acquisition is an extremely important part of every digital journey and digital app we've created. The focus is to build that scale. Without really naming numbers, over the next two to three years, the pure digital assisted and unassisted will be a significant portion of incremental acquisition going forward. To answer that question of scale, yes, the point is absolutely valid, and we've built it, baked into our strategy. Not just the payments, but whether it's with SmartHub or with PayZapp, all the businesses' acquisition of new customers at scale is an integral part of our digital journeys.

Unknown20:50

Thank you so much. I won't take up too much of your time. Our lending part of the business, right? In lending, we've been like a stealth learning machine over the last 20 years. We probably have the best risk-adjusted book, and we've learned, as you know, asset by asset, and we've got the best asset quality book in this country. Whereas in terms of UI of our net banking, SmartBuy, wallets, consistently we've been subpar. So do we have, or are we lacking a feedback loop system within our organization which gives us feedback, or some third-party audit or feedback which tells us that the UI is miles ahead of everybody else? On the other side, we seem to be either lacking a feedback system or something seems to be amiss. If you could just share how we go about this, whereas in lending, you expressed it year after year and we hear it and see it in the numbers, whereas this is something we cannot solve the puzzle in our heads. So if you could give a deeper insight as to how we are going about solving it, where are the issues, have we identified the issues? If you could share it.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan22:47

So to understand your question in a lighter way, you're asking me why am I an ugly duckling? A joke about that, I think. Yes, clearly we understand that customer optics, UX, and the user journey are an extremely important part of his onboarding journey, etc. We've done multiple things, amongst other things, to really look at that. More than me talking about it, I think the glimpse we'll give you in the demos will give you an indication of the kind of UI/UX we're doing. But in detail, from a structure perspective, building an in-house and an external design studio to focus on building contemporary UI/UXs which look at what the customer does, a design philosophy which starts from UI/UX first and goes backwards to ensure that the user journey is seamless, a couple of the areas which are an integral part of our entire pod structure when we built our MVPs, not just the front end but also a lot of the back end stuff. So I can keep on going on and on, and these are the things we're doing at the ground level. There are operating work-level related changes we're doing. But I think the proof of the pudding will be the demos you'll see, which will give you an indication of the kind of UI/UX we're actually building. I'd probably try to leave it at that, because the demos will speak for themselves.

Unknown24:47

Yeah, so just to add, right? So what you just said, I could not really understand. This is still as to do we really have a feedback system? It's a simple question. I mean, you're not asking in the same format. Every other bank's website looks glossy and good. Your UX, you have to see the same thing for the last seven years, right? That's the fundamental question. Glossy is different, ease of use is different. I'll come to that.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan25:26

So the two aspects to this. One, you know, the scale at which the mobile and internet assets of the bank works is extremely different from some of the peer players. Number one. So changing that at a mass scale is a very, very risky aspect, and we have gone through this multiple times earlier. What we are doing there is, instead of... one has to really make the UI/UX very good, but if the back end is not holding up, you will again come back to square one because the problem has largely been to scale up the back end first. You would have seen some of those results coming off if you used the app lately. But changing incrementally on the UI platform on an old technology will only take you that much. So what we are doing there is two important things: we are rebuilding and rewriting our entire mobile app, and not just from a front-end perspective, because that's just going to again lead you into trouble. So there is a project, in fact, we couldn't cover in the presentation, but if you look at the presentation, you will see a new mobile bank. In fact, we are actually developing the mobile app because we want to get the entire front-end experience and the middleware with us, not kind of dependent on a third-party partner. A lot of banks today work only as product packagers. The game is three weeks MVP and a quick rollout on the front-end apps. So I think there are two strategies here, and that's why mobile and net banking interfaces will follow up. PayZapp will come in, SmartHub is already in. Some of the new acquisition journeys, the entire look and feel is changing, and you will start seeing improvements into mobile. In fact, I don't know if you've already looked at the 11.1 version we have done; we've done some lookups. I wouldn't say it's gone beyond. We're going to launch a new internet banking, and that's still a little back-ended in that sense. And then we will introduce our own mobile app around, let's say, about nine to ten months away at this point of time. This is a very different strategy from a back-end technology perspective. While we are building the mobile app, these are not just buying the product; we are actually getting into very deep partnerships with people like Google, with Aerospike, and the programming languages completely change from Java-based to Golang. A lot of that kind of work is happening today on the ground. None of these applications like PayZapp are built in by enterprise classical thought ones; these are quasi-startups working in co-working spaces in partnership with design studios. So a lot of change has gone in. It's just that we don't talk about it because we think we need to get some time to start putting these assets on the table and then show what we can do. One example: building a good digital product requires a good engagement layer where we create good experiences. Both have to work together, and in between is a middleware which allows APIs, data, and functions to be exposed. We have to do it holistically. A good example is what we have done on UPI. Everybody has a very similar experience; it's a public digital good. Why is it that HDFC Bank has the least amount of failures on that? Because with that kind of experience, we have built a very robust and resilient back end and the underlying infrastructure. So we are now ready to create new experiences which will match the best available in the market and will be supported by a very resilient infrastructure that we have built. The demos will give you a sense of what is available by the best in the market today. None of the demos you see are on-prem; these are all cloud-native, container-driven, modern kind of stacks. These are already on. In fact, we are probably one of the banks which have gone with four or five apps already on the cloud, and we are clear that over the next two to three years, we'll probably have 60% on cloud as a company.

Unknown30:36

So if you allow me, I'll just narrate one small example.

I'll take more than 15 seconds, sorry.

Really, 15 seconds? I think the answers might take a bit longer, right? So we can probably go through the demo, we can connect offline and have a conversation. That works.

Thanks. So let me take you through what we see here on the new PayZapp app. So I am a citizen of this country who has got a bank account with some cards available. I switch on my PayZapp app, I download it from the app store. I choose my mobile number, I choose the terms and conditions, move ahead and say okay. I have a dual SIM phone, so I have to choose which SIM I'm going to use for my transactions. The moment I give my mobile number, this recognizes me as a customer of HDFC Bank in this case and shows my debit card, where I'm being asked for the last four digits of my debit card. I enter that, and it authenticates me. But this is not all. I am also having a bank account from another bank which is not HDFC Bank. So how do I link my card over there? I just add that. I give the details of that card here. It's a PNB account. So I have to give my OTP to authenticate myself, which comes from the bank. And there you see my PNB account and the card is also linked here. With this, I'm able to onboard myself as a customer with all my credit cards and debit cards across any bank in the country. Then when I proceed from here, this is my prepaid card which appears inside PayZapp. And here I am live. I use my authentication with my Face ID or biometric to open the account which is set up here. So this is the onboarding process which is available. This is completely safe and secure. It pulls all my accounts and cards across any banking ecosystem where it is present today. Now, what do I do with this? I go into a store where I want to use my PayZapp as a payment app. I see a QR code. I choose the amount that I have to pay. Let's say I want to pay 500 rupees. I choose the account through which I want to pay. I can pay using any of the form factors here. What I demonstrated just now is only through UPI, but I can pay through a credit card, debit card, all our tokenized cards here. The transaction can go through any of these means. We can add any of the billers here. I click on linking billers, it uses my mobile number to fetch all the billers that I have, and I can view the bills which are available. I have a Videocon, a Vodafone Idea, and an HDFC Fastag which is available. I can see that some of these are due in two days and three days. I can use any of these methods to pay for it. Here you can see that the Videocon outstanding is 1760 on my bill. I apply a coupon code which is available right now through PayZapp. I apply it, I get a discount of 20 rupees because I am using the coupon, and then I swipe and pay, and the transaction is done. This is the experience which is not available today on any of the payment apps across the country. In that same manner, if I want to pay to any of my contacts available in UPI, I go through the app again. I choose send money. I put down the name of the person whom I want to pay. In this case, it is Nirmal. I choose Nirmal's name here. I choose the amount that I want to pay. Even if the recipient is not with PayZapp, the recipient could be on any of the PSP apps, let's say PhonePe or Google Pay. I'm able to send money to that person. But at the same time, we can add PayZapp as a preferred means of receiving money by saying that create UPI handle through PayZapp. I give my mobile number and create a UPI number, so then PayZapp becomes the preferred way of receiving money from any of the PSP apps across the country. So that's the kind of experience we are building through the new PayZapp app. Let me take you through another example. Let's say if I want to book a ticket, how can I do that? I go to the SmartBuy section. I choose a bus ticket available from RedBus. I choose the option that is suiting me. I apply the promotion code, and this is what it gives me. I can pay through a credit card, debit card, net banking, or through PayZapp. I choose to pay with PayZapp. Here again, I swipe to pay, and the transaction is done. This is one of the safest ways to make payments for commerce as well as any of the marketplaces using the new PayZapp app we are building here. Likewise, if I am on a website where I want to buy some groceries, I go on the website, I choose my product, add it to the catalog, and then I choose to pay with PayZapp. I link my account which is linked here and pay using PayZapp. So that's the kind of experience we are talking about when you do commerce, and we are able to pay using PayZapp for each of these properties. I think there was one question around how do we link PayZapp and make it available across all digital commerce properties. This is now equipped to do that. The other question, of course, is how do we make it happen across the entire ecosystem which is available in India. This also has a completely self-care app. Customers can raise tickets, we can see smart statements where I can go and see how am I spending my money. So that's the kind of experience we are creating on PayZapp. I'm also going to take us through another one, which is the customer experience hub, which is what Parag spoke about in his conversation. It's a way to support a customer. A customer today can reach out to the bank through the 1-800 number. What is the kind of experience our customers are going to get? Hello, kitty. Welcome to HDFC Bank. How can I help you today? Hi, I've lost my credit card. Can you help me block it, please? Okay, let me help you with that. I am initiating the card blocking process for you. I'll have shared a four-digit OTP on your registered mobile number. Can you please enter that? Thank you for providing the OTP. Your credit card is blocked now, and you will receive a confirmation SMS and email. Do you need any help with anything else? No, that's all for now. Thank you. So what you heard just now was the voice of a bot. This is a digital deflection. A call is coming in to get support from phone banking. The IVR is smart enough to speak to the customer and is able to serve the customer. We have seen that we've analyzed the calls that come to our call center and various complaints and queries that come. Most of these can be solved using technology today. There are complex queries and questions which will come which still have to be handled with agents, but a lot of it can be handled using technology. Today, the bots are smart enough if we can power it with the right data. If a customer tweets and complains, again the same bot is going to respond accordingly and is going to get in touch with the customer to solve the customer problem. This kind of digital deflection, we are seeing encouraging results. About 25% of the overall tickets are coming down. So if we had a human who was handling this as compared to a bot, we've already launched it at two of the channels, and we are seeing some encouraging results over there. A lot of emails that come today, earlier somebody used to read that and say, okay, this is a credit card related email, it needs to go to the credit card support desk. This is a PL related complaint, it needs to go to a PL desk. Now, the bot is able to not capture the intent of the customer in that case, human interventions are needed, but a large part of it is being handled through bots today. We've seen encouraging results. AI/ML is also acting on the same set of things, so bots are learning as well. The first hundred thousand emails might be difficult to read, but the next hundred thousand emails are easier to read because the bot is constantly reading and understanding some of these things. So that's the kind of customer care platform we are building. Shashi in the morning spoke about building a service-first organization, and here is a capability that we are bringing in to serve our customers across multiple channels. So after this, I'm going to take you through the SmartHub. So Parag spoke about creating a merchant ecosystem. We've already got an active set of merchants which are more than 2 million today. These merchants have taken some time; we had to go to these merchants, open their current account, make them a merchant, onboard them, and now they are ready to accept. If we have to do the same to get to 20 million, then we have to handle a long tail of merchants. Imagine if I am a shopkeeper in a rural hinterland in India, how can I become a merchant very quickly with HDFC Bank? Now that kind of capability is available today with us on the new SmartHub. I want to just demonstrate how a small shopkeeper in a rural area can become a merchant. So let's imagine that I am a merchant and I download this SmartHub app from the app store. What can I do with it? I will choose a language here. Then I say I want to register. I choose my mobile number. Then I enter my PAN details. I agree to the terms and conditions. I give the OTP that is coming on my mobile phone. My OTP gets verified. I'm setting an MPIN for my new app. I get an SMS. Is it visible now? I choose my account with HDFC Bank that I want to link it where I want to accept money. Then I choose the category of merchant I am. So I want to be an apparel merchant. This is for MCC. I give my GSTN ID details, my email ID. I disclose my annual turnover. And here I say whether I am helped by an HDFC Bank employee, as Parag mentioned we have an assisted and an unassisted journey. I complete it. Just by following this process, I have become a merchant who is active and ready to accept payment by any customer who comes into my store. So let's see what I can do with this now. I've become a merchant who's live. I have the first customer walking in. I show my Bharat QR code to that customer and put down the mobile number of the customer. I say I want to collect 1000 rupees and initiate the payment. Here is a QR code that appears on my phone that the customer is going to scan through her phone and make the payment. Immediately, I can also send a collect UPI instruction to my customer. So I'm doing that. I'm sending a 1500 rupees instruction to my customer to initiate a payment. I sent this through WhatsApp. My customer gets this message that she has to pay me 1500 rupees. I go to the dashboard, I still see 1000 rupees. This means my customer has not paid it yet. Then I see my recent transactions. I can see a green tick here which was for 1000 rupees which the customer paid. This is a yellow tick, so my customer who has received the instruction on WhatsApp has actually not paid yet. The moment that customer pays, it becomes green here and it reflects in the dashboard. So this allows the shopkeeper to engage with the customer. Typically, a small kirana store will have 100 families in and around who are going to take stuff, take groceries back home. You need to collect money from those families. This allows the shopkeeper to collect all that kind of payments coming from the customer. Not only this, this app also enables me to do banking. Let's say I am a shopkeeper who is using this app and I need a loan here from HDFC Bank. I go to the loan section. I can see a Dukandar Overdraft, I can see FlexiPay, Business Loan Insta Loan, various loan amounts are given. I choose one of the loans, let's say Jumbo Loan, and apply for it. The moment I click on that, I see a new form that appears here. This is again 100% digital inside the app on my handset. I can give my mobile number, I enter the OTP. It allows me to choose do I want 8 lakh rupees or do I want a little more or less. I choose the tenure here. It shows me how much is the EMI, what is the monthly rate of interest, what is the processing fee. Once I agree to the terms and conditions, this 8 lakh rupees is transferred to my account. And this is a bank in a box for me. I don't really need to go into a bank branch or talk to any bank officer. I can be in any part of the country, and this is available as long as I have connectivity. So this is another way on the acquiring side where our merchants can grow faster in partnership with HDFC Bank. I'm going to just stop here with these three examples.

We'll just do a very quick round of one or two questions maximum.

Yeah, a couple of questions. When you're putting this aspiration to build this technology stack, what is the target you're benchmarking against? Is it the equivalent of the best in fintech or the best bank? What is the aspirational level, and what is the timeline for that aspirational level?

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan52:36

First of all, what you are seeing here is not an aspiration. This is something, for example, SmartHub is already live in the market today with a few of the stores. We've not rolled it out across the country. It is available. What you saw on the customer experience hub, that is again available today for the two channels. We are doing the pilot in one of our phone banking centers. Our benchmark is consumer tech companies. It's not financial services, it's not fintech. When you get up in the morning, you don't want to go into a bank. You are used to dealing with technology in a certain manner which is actually being propagated over the last so many years in consumer tech. When I watch Netflix, I know which movie I'm going into. If I pause the film, I can come back tomorrow and it starts from there. So my consumer habit is being framed not just by fintechs or financial services or banks. It is being inculcated in me through various touch points of technology. And that is the kind of experience that we want to bring in. When you call a phone banking channel, do you really want to go through a long IVR? You can just do that conversation and move on. So the kind of experience we are building should be so seamless that it is not a chore for a customer. It is fun to interact and get some of these things done.

Unknown54:26

Yeah, on this same, under a different access on this, you want to benchmark just consumer tech. Consumer tech companies do a great job of using whatever data they can get on customers to customize and solve problems. The banks sit on a treasure trove of data. You know which mobile operator I use, what is my monthly electricity bill because I paid the electricity bill on your app. You know whether I have how many kids because school fees get paid. So you have all the data sitting inside the bank, unlike other platforms. How to use this data to offer better products to customers? Because even today, I see you might know everything about me, but in fact, my credentials are taken by a CIBIL score, despite the fact that I may have a 15-year history with you as a bank customer.

Ramesh Lakshminarayanan55:35

I'll respond to that question quickly because you asked. The banks had a very poor data strategy. Why? Because a lot of them chased monolithic data warehouses, enterprise projects, Netezza, Teradata of the world, centrally run IT trying to put all the data together. It hasn't worked. Let's be honest. Then the cloud databases started coming in. So the entire data strategy moved from an on-prem monolithic clunky stuff to a very agile, scalable cloud data lake. That's the first step: to facilitate that. The bank is already, in fact, we are moving away from our centralized data warehouse thought process to a cloud data lake. We are actually working with Microsoft; we are going Azure Data Lake. But that doesn't solve it; that's still consolidating the data. The second is you actually overlay with what I call every API has to be tagged along with the data API, because that's where the decision points come. So if you're fetching an account query balance and with the data API equivalent to give an insight on that, then you make it much more powerful for a cross-sell at every point of time. So the API-fication, data-driven, centralized, moving to cloud, there's a lot of work happening. And we may be looking at it as each of these data points are federated lakes for the businesses to really leverage, because rather than centralizing everything and running, that's been the problem actually. So there is a lot of work happening in this area. It's a project that is a long-standing project, but you'll start seeing MVPs coming out much faster. In fact, we're already doing something very interesting called Spark Beyond on the marketing side, which is an interesting cloud-enabled data analytics platform where the cross-sell analytics is coming through. But a lot of work to do, just to answer the question. But the fundamental foundation is already started being built, and clearly moving away from classical data thought process to a new age data process. And you're right, this is a big area. The base and the offers that we have today with 70 million customers, when we mine their data, we've got 77 million product offers which are available. So technically, just by looking at our own data, we can create another HDFC Bank out of the products that we can target and personalize. What you saw is an application which works on APIs, but analytics is a big part of it. APIs and analytics together are going to do that magic. We are good; this journey is underway, but you will see some of this personalization happening now. In fact, some of the thought process in the digital banking also come from that. For example, a lot of work today is moving on headless CRMs. No longer people log into a CRM and do four clicks to get a data point. Your AI/ML engine can tell you these are the top three customers to call, this is the relationship value of that particular four customers, and this is probably where you have to focus your sales on. It's an intuitive thing that can come from the back end. Not just that, in fact, it's moved much beyond today. We're working with Microsoft on a very interesting project where you get a third-party. Suppose the RM calls up the customers and assumes you need to convert those leads, because it's a conversation, and then you have bots today sitting in between listening to the conversation.