In the past few years, the digital landscape of India has witnessed tremendous growth. From Aadhaar and UPI to ONDC, India’s public digital infrastructure has leapfrogged and this has impacted several industries, especially the financial services.
During a panel discussion at the launch of Dentsu Digital Advertising Report 2023, India’s digital stack was highlighted.
Abhijit Shah, Head Marketing, Digital & Customer Experience, ICICI Prudential AMC, said, “The largest gamechanger for us as an industry is specially in mutual funds has been the digital onboarding that India stack provides. Opening a mutual fund account was a tedious process and with numerous documents requirement, you’d go back and forth. It was a large and a difficult process and at the same time there were many friction points. People in the room definitely can appreciate and understand that the more friction, the more drop off and less conversion. But Aadhar-based eKYC works really wonders and within a few seconds you can actually get onboarded. So for us that’s been the real gamechanger.”
Prasad Pimple, Executive Vice President & Head of Digital Business Unit, Kotak Life, remarked, “From the perspective of any BFSI company today, all of the tools, not just the eKYC solution, but the UPI payment and the entire ecosystem of payment gateway, is important. We all have been doing digital businesses for the last 15 years now but the ease with which the consumer can complete the journey online, that has tremendously changed with the advent of eKYC plus UPI as a payment.Everything that we are currently experiencing is helping us build that ecosystem stronger from a customer perspective.”
Gagn Singla, MD, blinkX by JM Financial, underlined the ease of UPI and RoI at scale that digital allows.
“Financial industry is completely changing. We can build scale. Building scale in financial services has always been a pain because the ROI doesn’t work out without the digital. It has always been a (big) cost to service, but with the tech ecosystem it is possible. All parts of the digital stack are critical for us.”
Medhavi Singh, Head of Enterprise – India, Criteo, remarked, “Aadhar has definitely paved the way for the whole stack but UPI really was an absolute gamechanger. UPI really helped to change the way digital payment was happening and on one end there was the government that was ensuring that more and more people become bank account holders and on the other end there are fintech firms who are ensuring that people who do not even have a bank account are able to seamlessly do digital payments. Also, Covid really accelerated it because it took four years since its inception for it to cross 3 lakh crores, then within one year from 2020 to 2021 it actually more than doubled to 7 lakh crores.”
