Yes Bank has challenged the assumptions and has always thought of doing things in a different way. Not from a rebel or a competitor kind of an approach but purely because the bank has believed in it. Given this context, Ritesh Pai, Sr. President & Country Head – Digital Banking, Yes Bank maps the digital initiatives for his bank, with the opportunities available in the marketplace
Digital at Yes Bank plays a dual role. At times we have the external face, where we go and acquire customers. At times, we also play the role of an enabler. It’s an horizontal role that cuts across all the business units. For example, tomorrow, if the agri division requires my services, I am more than happy to provide a tablet or a micro-ATM solution, and they in turn, will provide it to their customers. I play the role of an enabler. Typically from an online acquisition perspective, if the credit card acquisitions happen through the online channel, the retail assets are acquired through the online channel. Very soon, we will also be including the liabilities piece. These are those business units that benefit from acquiring the customer but the backend initiative, which is driving this, will be the digital channels.
For us, some of the prepaid solutions that we have launched (Edenred, Freecharge, Niyo, Yes Money), have all been revenue generators. They are sustaining the programme on their own. So, it is paying back what we have invested. Some of the solutions like Taiysis are very nascent – these are around 2-3 months old. So, it will be very early to predict any kind of return. The idea is also that when we talk of translating into value, it need not always be in the form of monetary revenue. It can also be in the form of some intangible benefits from a mindshare perspective or getting access to cross sell some of my other products, where technically we may not be servicing them but we can still end up doing some third party distribution.
I can safely say that the payment initiatives that we have already begun are generating revenue because these are tangible things. Either it’s a fee based income or a transaction priced income that we are doing. Some other innovations such as our social media app or the bots that we have launched are more of a wow thing, because we become the first in the country to launch some of these initiatives. Secondly, it is also enabling some of my existing business units to leverage these initiatives. It will either offset my customer servicing cost or reduce the operational costs at my branch, which in turn benefits their product P&L.
Digital programmes for the internal staff
There are multiple things which are happening. One of the easiest and simple initiative is a statement analyser. For example, today whenever a credit team has to make decisions in absence of any automated method, the relationship manager needs to scan through the bank statement. Typically for a current account statement, there are about 20 pages to look at. One has to enter the figures in Excel and then do the maths. This entire exercise takes about 5-6 hours when done by two people with a maker-checker arrangement. This was replaced by putting a statement analyser. The PDF version could be uploaded and the entire statement is done within 15-20 mins including the calculations required.
We have built a lot of workflows. The Niyo thing that we have launched is all on eKYC. The onboarding and customer acquisition is all automated. We have seen a 90% success on some of these customer acquisitions. Tablet related solutions have been rolled out in the agri business. The Business Correspondents (BC) have been given these tablets for all the loan disbursals and collections.
Revamping core IT applications
The CRM and analytics piece is underway, which will help in giving us insights around the cross sell, upsell, behavioral and predictive analysis that we need to do. Also, we are re-platforming the entire bank. The entire core banking setup is getting changed. Hopefully, in December 1st week, we should be on a new CBS. A new mobile app will be launched in a couple of weeks time. Our entire Internet banking will be revamped.. In the current scheme of things, it may not help us scale. It will also help us in launching many more digital initiatives in a much more faster way. So, there is a lot of process automation and workflows which we have built. These may not be visible to the external world, but it will help in bringing in a lot of efficiency in terms of the turnaround times in which the customer gets serviced.
Moving towards self-service
The idea is also to move towards a more self serviced method of processing transactions vis-a-vis assisted ones. Some of the branches also that we will be launching in the future will be more on the smart or the digital branch concept. The idea is to cut down on the geographical spread of the branch, but there will be a lot of self service devices that will be available for the customer to transact. So, even if the customer is not visiting the branch at branch hours, he can do all the transactions that he could have done in office hours. All these initiatives are at various stages – some or already implemented or to be done soon.
Partnership models
From a digital perspective, 20% of the innovation is done in-house, while 80% would be in a partnership mode. The nature of partnership varies, either a plug and play like Taisys. In certain cases, it can only be a revenue share like a Freecharge, where we end up issuing a card. But, whatever transactions happen, the revenue is split. In other cases, it could be purely an ASP kind of a model where the bank will pay a per transaction fixed fee irrespective of what the revenues are.