Piramal Finance earlier this year rolled out a hyperlocal, digital-first campaign during the ongoing cricket season, leveraging the surge in mobile and YouTube consumption to spotlight its 701-branch network across India.
Built on the insight that cricket viewership today extends beyond live match streaming, with a significant share of audiences consuming match highlights, creator-led content, and short-form videos on platforms like YouTube, the campaign was designed to meet consumers where they are on their phones, in their language, and within their locality.
At the core of the campaign was a series of 1000+ short digital films, each customised to a specific branch. While the central narrative remains consistent, every asset is tailored with branch-level identification, regional language adaptation (8 languages), and local context, making the communication highly relevant and actionable.
What makes this campaign distinctive is its hybrid production approach, combining a traditional shoot with AI-led adaptations for localisation and sync. This has enabled Piramal Finance to rapidly scale content creation, ensuring each video remains contextually relevant while maintaining consistency in storytelling and brand voice.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Arvind Iyer, CMO, Piramal Finance
Q. Customer behaviour is evolving rapidly. How is Piramal Finance adapting its strategy in 2026?
One of the biggest shifts we’re seeing is that customers no longer experience financial services in isolation. Every good experience they have elsewhere shapes what they expect from us.
If ordering food takes two minutes, opening a bank account is instant, and support is available at the click of a button, those experiences naturally influence expectations across categories.
At the same time, particularly across Bharat, aspiration is growing faster than ever. There are more first-time entrepreneurs, more and more salaried class, more self-employed professionals, more families building homes, and more people actively looking to improve their financial position.
Our job is to respond to both realities.
That means making journeys simpler and faster through technology. But it also means staying close to local markets because aspirations may be universal, while context is often deeply local.
We’ve learnt that scale is important. Consistency is important. But relevance matters as much.
Which is why we continue to invest in local understanding, local communication and local distribution alongside digital capability.
Q. Is predictive analytics playing an increasingly important role in creating appropriate solutions?
Absolutely.
Good analytics helps you move from reacting to customers to understanding them earlier.
It helps identify patterns, anticipate needs and make better decisions.
But one interesting reality of financial services is that a customer’s story is often richer than what appears in a dataset.
Data can tell you what happened.
It cannot always explain the context around why it happened.
Particularly across Bharat, customers have aspirations, business realities and life circumstances that don’t always fit neatly into structured information.
So we see predictive analytics as a very powerful capability, but not as a substitute for customer understanding.
The real opportunity is bringing data and human judgment together.
When analytics helps you identify a pattern, and local teams help you understand the context behind it, decisions become significantly better.
Q. Many customers do not operate fully within formal financial systems. How challenging is it to reach them with relevant messaging?
One of the things that always strikes me when I travel across the country is the sheer amount of ambition you see.
People are building businesses, creating livelihoods, managing cash flows, educating their children and investing in their futures.
Formal systems often capture part of that story. The human reality is usually much richer.
For us, the challenge has never been just about reach.
It’s about understanding.
Communication becomes more effective when people feel recognised and understood in the context of their aspirations.
That is one reason the Neeyat platform has resonated. It starts with a simple belief that intent deserves understanding.
And once that belief is genuine, communication tends to become much more natural.
Q. How will “Hum Kagaz Se Zyada Neeyat Dekhte Hain” show up in 2026?
The simplest answer is that it will continue to show up where it matters most: in how we see customers.
Many campaigns come and go. The ideas that endure tend to become beliefs.
For us, Neeyat has gradually evolved beyond communication.
It influences how we think about stories. How we think about customer journeys. And increasingly, how we think about experience.
In 2026, you’ll continue to see us celebrate people and the progress they’re making in their lives.
Because that’s really what Neeyat has always been about.
Recognising the individual behind the application.
Q. What role will cricket and sport play in Piramal Finance’s media mix?
Cricket is one of those rare platforms that bring people together across regions, languages and communities.
That collective connection is incredibly powerful.
But what interests us most is not simply the scale of cricket.
It’s the opportunity to make that scale feel locally relevant.
Our approach has been to use cricket as a cultural canvas while ensuring the execution feels close to the realities of different markets.
When customers see something that reflects their context, sport becomes much more than sponsorship. It becomes participation.
Q. Is AI making relevant communication easier beyond this campaign?
It is helping enormously.
One of the enduring challenges in India has always been balancing consistency and relevance.
You want customers to experience one brand. At the same time, you want communication to feel meaningful across very different regions, languages and customer contexts.
AI is helping bridge that gap.
It’s allowing us to adapt communication faster, personalise more effectively and operate at a scale that would have been difficult previously.
But ultimately, AI is an enabler.
It can help us personalise.
It can help us adapt.
The responsibility for understanding what matters to people still sits with us.
The future isn’t AI replacing marketers.
It’s marketers using AI to become more relevant.
Q. Does the cricket campaign target both secured and unsecured loan customers?
The campaign is fundamentally a brand building effort.
We serve customers with a wide range of needs and life stages.
Rather than beginning with a product, we chose to begin with a shared cultural moment.
The role of the campaign is to build familiarity and trust at a brand level.
From there, different products and solutions become relevant depending on the customer’s individual requirements.
Ultimately, people build relationships with brands long before they engage with specific products.
That’s the role the campaign is playing.
Q. How do customer experiences shape campaign creation?
Almost every worthwhile campaign begins with observation.
A conversation.
A branch visit.
A customer interaction.
A pattern you keep noticing.
The strongest ideas are usually hiding in plain sight.
Neeyat emerged from recognising that people’s potential cannot always be captured through paperwork.
Parakh emerged from a belief that character is often revealed in ways that don’t fit conventional measures.
Customer experience provides the raw material.
Our responsibility is to listen carefully enough to recognise the insight.
Q. How will catchment-level visibility improve in 2026?
We’re spending more time thinking about visibility through the lens of proximity.
National visibility is important.
But familiarity is often built much closer to home.
People tend to trust what they repeatedly see and experience within their own environment.
That’s why marketing at catchments remains important.
You’ll see a stronger emphasis on regional integration, branch-level visibility, vernacular communication and localised engagement.
The objective is very simple.
To ensure the brand feels present where customers actually live, work and make decisions.
Q. What shape will on-ground marketing take through partnerships with police departments?
One area where we see a growing responsibility is customer education.
Particularly around cyber fraud and financial awareness.
As financial and digital adoption continue to grow, helping people navigate those environments safely becomes increasingly important.
That is where partnerships with local authorities can play a meaningful role.
When awareness moves beyond advertising and becomes part of community conversations, the impact is often much deeper.
The objective is to make important information more accessible and more actionable.
If people can make better informed decisions as a result, that is a worthwhile outcome in itself.
Q. Is the role of emotion in BFSI storytelling growing?
Financial services have always been deeply emotional.
The decision may be financial, but what sits behind it usually isn’t.
– A family moving into a home.
– An entrepreneur expanding a business.
– Parents creating opportunities for their children. (and so on)
The financial product is often the enabler, what drives them is their destination, which ultimately is what they are aspiring for.
The role of storytelling is not just to create or stir emotions. It is to recognise and reflect the emotion that is already present in the customer’s journey/life.
That’s why trust remains so important in this category.
People are rarely making purely financial decisions. They’re making life decisions.
And that deserves a degree of understanding and humanity in how we communicate.
