When Airtel Payments Bank was launched, India’s digital payments landscape was already heating up. Wallets, UPI, and fintech apps had transformed how millions transacted daily. Yet, one persistent concern lingered: trust. Even as digital adoption surged, many Indians hesitated to link their primary bank accounts to online payments, fearing fraud and data compromise.
That very sentiment, says Anubrata Biswas, Managing Director and CEO of Airtel Payments Bank in a recent conversation with Express Computer, is now shaping a new era in digital banking, one defined by what he calls the “safe second account.”
“People are increasingly wanting to keep their main bank account, where they store their savings, safe from any perceived risk of fraud. That’s driving the need for a second, digital-first account they can use for everyday payments,” says Biswas.
A recent survey conducted by the bank revealed that 94% of respondents prefer having a separate digital payments account. It’s a clear sign of how customer behaviour, once defined by scarcity and consolidation, is now moving toward choice and specialisation.
From scarcity to digital abundance
For decades, banking in India was a one-size-fits-all proposition. “Traditionally, banking was a commodity business,” Biswas reflects. “You had one account for all financial transactions, mainly because opening multiple accounts was difficult.”
The transformation began when India’s digital public infrastructure, built on mobile and internet penetration, Aadhaar, and UPI, made access effortless. Opening a bank account no longer required paperwork or long queues; with Airtel Payments Bank, Biswas notes, “a consumer can open a bank account online or at a retail point in just two to three minutes.”
This ease has splintered the traditional model. As barriers to entry fell, demand diversified, and customers began looking for banks that served different purposes, safety, convenience, or specialisation.
The rise of digital-first trust
Globally, this shift mirrors the rise of mobile-first digital banks like Revolut in the UK or Nubank in Brazil. Biswas believes India is firmly on that path.
“Every large economy has seen the rise of digital banks. India is now part of that wave, and Airtel Payments Bank can claim to be among the first of this next generation,” he says confidently.
The bank’s rapid scale underscores that belief. Biswas informed that Airtel Payments Bank today serves over 100 million monthly users, including 25 million active bank account holders, making it India’s third-largest bank by mobile banking usage, after SBI and HDFC Bank.
Originally focused on rural outreach through its extensive retail network, the bank has now seen widespread adoption across urban and semi-urban markets. The “safe second account” has become its defining growth vector, used by consumers for online shopping, QR payments, and merchant transactions.
The new customer archetype
If the early adopter was a 35–45-year-old urban male shopping online, today’s landscape looks very different. Two fast-growing segments are reshaping the bank’s user base, women managing household finances and tier-2 and tier-3 city earners turning to digital for everyday needs.
“The woman of the house who manages family expenses and doesn’t want to make mistakes, that’s a huge segment for us,” says Biswas. “And the earning male from smaller towns who’s becoming digitally savvy, that’s another.”
With a billion financial data points generated every month, Airtel Payments Bank is able to observe these shifts in near real-time. “India is changing rapidly,” Biswas adds. “Customer behaviour that used to evolve over years now changes in just 12 to 18 months.”
Building an intelligent backbone
To keep up with this pace, the bank has invested heavily in data aggregation and simplification. Over the last few years, it has built a centralised cloud-based data lake that feeds these billion data points every month into models that evolve from linear to machine learning and AI-driven frameworks.
“Our teams, marketing, insights, data science, technology, all rely on this single data backbone to separate signal from noise,” explains Biswas. “That’s the only way to respond to customers as fast as their expectations change.”
The idea is not just to collect data, but to listen to it intelligently, turning raw information into actionable insights, personalised offers, and stronger fraud detection.
AI for growth, risk, and experience
AI, for Airtel Payments Bank, is not a buzzword but a structural pillar. Biswas categorises its use into four verticals: growth, experience, risk, and efficiency.
“For growth, risk, and experience, you need deep customer data and the ability to build models on top of it,” he says. “For efficiency, you need to understand your processes.”
The bank has already built significant AI capabilities in risk management and efficiency optimisation, and is now working to extend them to growth and customer experience. Tools like AI-powered facial biometrics and real-time transaction alerts give customers transparency and control, two critical ingredients of digital trust.
The delicate balance of security and ease
In the world of digital banking, convenience and security often pull in opposite directions. Airtel Payments Bank’s approach, says Biswas, is to blend the two seamlessly.
“It’s essentially a trade-off between control and ease,” he explains. “A feature like ‘freeze/unfreeze’ gives customers the power to lock their account when they’re traveling, that’s psychological control. At the same time, our systems monitor for suspicious activity and can freeze an account automatically if we detect something unusual.”
The engine behind that balance is a layer of machine learning models trained on the bank’s large data sets, capable of detecting anomalies without compromising on user experience. “These models only work well in digital banks of scale,” Biswas notes.
While agentic AI models aren’t yet deployed for backend risk detection, the bank plans to use them soon for enhancing front-end customer experience, bringing conversational intelligence into play.
So, as the digital ecosystem matures, Biswas sees a future where unbundled banking, multiple specialised accounts for different financial needs, becomes the norm in India.
“We’re extremely excited about the rise of digital banking and unbundling,” he says. “In the short term, we’ll continue to double down on the ‘safe second account’ opportunity. In parallel, we’ll leverage AI and data to deliver better experiences and risk models.”