Ramesh Lakshminarayanan on merchant acquiring
From Payments Business, Tech & Digital | Mr. Parag Rao, Mr. Anjani Rathor, Mr. Ramesh Lakshminarayanan · · HDFCBank
“Part of our strategy is very simple: enter into the merchant acceptance space through payments, get the liability relationship, use the velocity of transactions and the balances which the merchant displays and therefore underwrite loans — small tickets like dukandar loans, business loans, card-on-card loans, all available as a pre-approved offer inside the app.”
On , Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, Chief Information Officer & Group Head of IT at HDFC Bank, spoke about merchant acquiring during Payments Business, Tech & Digital | Mr. Parag Rao, Mr. Anjani Rathor, Mr. Ramesh Lakshminarayanan on HDFCBank.
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.