3D Economy Data, Digital & Disruption

Banking Frontiers, in association with Snowflake, organized a web panel discussion by experts on the transformative role of data.

- Ravi Lalwani

Bertram D’Souza, SVP & Head - Digital Payments, Open Banking & Fintech Partnerships, Kotak Mahindra Bank

When it comes to data, banks have an inherent competitive advantage in terms of volume, quality and quantity of data whether it is demographic or transactional. The key to building successful digital products in this space is to collect deep insights from users and then create a good data collection architecture. It is also important to understand how this data can translate into a framework to deliver key business outcomes. BFSI entities have goals like how to use digital to identify the right customers for an acquisition perspective and how to engage with existing customers. A lot of engagement would come from a deep understanding of what makes a customer pick a product. Also need to understand enough about what the customer aspires for in the next level of products and services.

I think, that’s where digital plays a key role in delivering that native user experience to capture a user’s attention and cross-sell and upsell effectively.

A few years ago, Kotak Mahindra Bank started its data centralization journey. We recognized the fact that centralizing a lot of disparate data sources was crucial for future use-cases. Implementing use cases does take its own time as building intelligence on top of data is not an easy task. Historical information and certain recommendations in the digital layer can prompt/nudge a customer. All these models are tried and tested across the industry and some large players in the ecommerce ecosystem too have adopted it. We have first-hand learnings from this area.