When there is data, fikar not

Rishi Gupta is MD CEO of Fino Payments Bank. He has earlier worked at International Finance Corporation, ICICI Bank and Maruti Udyog. He was awarded CFO 100 Roll of Honor’ in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

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Manoj Agrawal: In today's era, where there is so much information available, do you see some kind of tendency among people to focus more on information analysis and lesser on execution? Is there some such trend?

Rishi Gupta: My view is that both these things are unrelated both go separately. If we look at analytics, 20 years ago there used to be much more of gut feeling. Now what has happened is that thanks to the advent of analytics, AI and a lot of secondary information (in social media and other channels), all that can be put together to have a very focused approach. So now to target somebody, you don't need to target the world. Even for TV, there is information about which customer categories or regions are watching each channel. We also have deep insights, such as that a lot of our customers use Oppo or Vivo phones. So now when we advertise on social media, we target people with Oppo and Vivo phones rather than target everybody. So our cost of targeted advertising comes down and we can see a higher result. So that is the power of information which has come.

Information helps us do better execution by focusing on targeted segments in various age groups in various geographies. When something works in one geography, we look for similar profiles in other geographies and get a better outcome. I believe that the power of analytics with good execution can give you wonderful results.

Between banks and fintechs, banks have enormous amount of customer data collected over several years, but that data lies in different silos. Hence a typical bank is unable to use that for better execution. On the other hand, at fintechs everything is sitting in one database. So that is the difference between good analytics capabilities and execution.