As customers of banking and financial services, we are bombarded with frequent tech-led changes that ease access but are also confusing and for some of us really challenging. Cash continues to be king even though the COVID-19 lockdown has accelerated digital payments like nothing else before.

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Ravi Santhanam, CMO, Head-Corporate Communications, as well as Head-Liability Products and Managed Programs at HDFC Bank; Sujatha V Kumar, Head, Marketing-India and South Asia, Visa; and Shalini Pillai Banerjee, Head-Marketing, Google Pay and Next Billion Users (NBU), India, discussed the challenges and opportunities for financial services marketing in this changing landscape.

"This sector has been extremely fast and sometimes we have been left behind by what the consumers want and what they have got from the rest of the players. Before the pandemic started, 90 percent of the transactions were anyway digital in the banking industry. What the pandemic made sure is the remaining 10 percent of the transactions also started coming into digital and these are all the people who didn't want to do digital earlier. While transactions were digital, the actual sales of many of these products were still not digital, it was still a highly distribution-led environment. The pandemic made the consumers move in that direction – if they can buy a ticket in an app, I can as well buy a personal loan also in an app and that was the biggest change that we have seen in the last 18 months,” said Santhanam.

"We have seen huge growth in adoption of cashless payment methods over the past one and a half years. It has been spurred since the pandemic started because the consumers who largely used cash have had to move to cashless methods whether it is at point-of-sale or even at home they use e-Commerce and it has gone up,” said Sujatha.

“There have been changes across in terms of digital behavior. The changes that we are seeing in the last 10 months would have usually taken 10 years,” Shalini mentioned.

“The pandemic has made every person operate very differently and forcing them to live online in the way they do their day-to-day things, the way they transact, the way they talk, the way they interact. Digital has made them self-reliant,” Shalini shared.

For the entire discussion, watch the accompanying video.

(Edited by : Priyanka Rathi)

First Published:Aug 19, 2021 3:05 PM IST