Axis Bank's mobile banking efforts pay off, with 113% YoY rise in volume of mobile banking transactions conducted
Axis Bank, which has been very pro-active about developing and promoting into mobile banking services, has reported that transactions conducted through these services reached INR 24bn ($379mn) in June, a rise of 113% YoY. An interview with Axis Bank's group executive and head of retail banking, Rajiv Anand, on the subject of the banks mobile banking advancements, can be found in the linked article.
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India’s third largest private sector lender Axis Bank witnessed Rs 2,400 crore worth transactions through mobile banking during June 2015. Mobile transactions have galloped nearly 113 percent year-on-year. This should hardly come as a surprise, considering the fact that Axis Bank is stepping on the accelerator to hit the digital highway in a big way.In a world enabled by screen ubiquity- courtesy smart phones, wearables and other smart devices- digital is the name of the game. And Axis Bank is leaving no tack untried to deliver a consistent experience to its customers across different digital channels.Ashwani Mishra caught up withto find out how he is orchestrating convenient transformations to make way for the digital culture and prepping the bank to make the digital leap.Our digital strategy is holistic and is based on four pillars viz. customers, internal employees, branches and the social media footprint. As an organization we are working towards embedding digital into our DNA.For over the past one year, we have embarked on a project called Pratham. The ultimate objective of the project involves reinventing the entire business process, including cutting the number of steps required, reducing the number of documents, developing automated decision making, and dealing with regulatory and fraud issues.One of the big initiatives in this project has been on the account opening side. Earlier, it took around 10 days to open an account. With digitization, we can now open a customer account in few hours. It’s one of the biggest exercises in terms of numbers. We are doing this in around 2600 branches, and across 1700 locations in the country. Today, around 70 percent of all account opening forms go through this process.The next stage to this is really moving to tablet based account opening. Around 600 of our Business Development Executives (BDEs) have been given tablets. So if a customer who has an Aadhar number and wants to open an account with us, all our BDEs need to do is ping the Aadhar database and generate an account number instantly for them.The pin numbers that were sent to customers written with ugly black ink has now been eliminated. Customers can now generate their own pin, either on the Internet or in the ATM and start using it. There has been a lot of work that has happened at the backend, probably less glamorous but equally important.Mobile app is the most visible part of our consumer facing digital strategy. We have about 30 percent of our customers on mobile app. These are customers who have never used or accessed our Internet banking website. They are app-only customers, which other banks are not able to offer. The whole idea for us is that when customer enters through our mobile app, they should get an overall banking experience. Customers can add beneficiaries and transfer funds directly. I am not going to ask them to first go to the Internet banking site, register or go to a branch and fill out a request. This is typically what you see even with banks who offer mobile apps. So their processes are not mobile-only.And of course in allowing all these actions, we need to ensure that it is secure. There is the highest level of security that we offer on the app. There is a whole lot of coding that goes at the back end to ensure that transactions can be offered with peace of mind to the customer.There are a host of other features which are not available anywhere else. For example, 90-95 percent of our customers who have the app and use our credit card now pay their credit card bills and view their statements from the app itself. I have a strong reason to believe that they have stopped taking physical statements.We are adding around 80,000 customers on a monthly basis to our mobile. We did Rs 12000 crore of transaction last year on mobile. Currently, we are seeing an average of Rs 2000 crore every month. This indicates that we will double our mobile transactions to Rs 24000 crore by end of this financial year. Between internet and mobile channels, we carried out over Rs 100,000 crore of transactions last year, and this too is set to grow exponentially.We have seen a clear trend of increasing preference towards transacting through electronic channels. In terms of the count of transactions, between 80 to 85 percent of transactions are happening outside the branches. However, the total number of transactions at the branch level has not reduced due to sustained increase in the count of branches every year as well as the increase in our customer base.Our experience has been that our exploits on the digital front have supplemented our physical presence. Branches not only play a very key role in acquiring new customers but also towards migrating customers to digital and we find that once migrated, customers increase their business and transactions with us across channels and products.Thanks to companies like Amazon, Apple, Uber and our own e-commerce firms; customers now expect every organization to deliver products and services swiftly, with a seamless user experience. From a mobile apps perspective we are no longer competing with BFSI players. The competition is now of a different kind. We are competing with user experience and it could emerge from anywhere and from anyone.As bankers we have evolved in terms of willing to accept failures within this space. Just because we have launched an app on a particular device and so we need to get X number of customers and the desired ROI is not in our control.Secondly we are spending a lot more time on design, which traditionally we did not. We want to keep the interface simple and want to ensure that the number of functionality in the app is less so that there is no complexity. Being a bank, we never focused on the design, as it did not come to us naturally.As a bank we have been quick to realize and rethink our core business strategies and make them more customer-centric. Ping Pay app is a great example of how we used our social insights to offer multi-social payment solution for customers. The customer insight in this case was that customers were spending a most of their time on mobile devices accessing social networks. So we said that if this is the customer usage, how we can engage with them financially within that space. This is how Ping Pay was created.One of the key things that we have also learnt is that it’s not just about transaction. It’s about engaging the customer within his space. Customers say nice things about us, they complain about us or they might have queries. We need to be listening and responding to them whenever they need us. Today, we are able to get back to our customers in 30 minutes if they approach us with any queries or complaints.