Innovate > Captivate > Celebrate

Banking Frontiers organized a conference on the theme ‘Innovate, Captivate, Celebrate’ in Mumbai. Highlights of the deliberations at the conference:

Vikram Vyas, Head, Contact Center, Joint GM, DCB Bank

DCB Bank was the first to introduce Aadhaar-based ATMs. We got a tremendous amount of feedback and goodwill for this. Now we have 176 such ATMs. It came out of a discussion at the board room. It clicked because it was seamless and did not require the customer to carry a card. The next generation customers do not want to talk to the bank. They do not open the mobile banking app every day as there is no stickiness. So, banks have to go where the customer is – eg SBI Yono. We do not know what the startups will come up with and hence we need to be agile to remain in this space.

We have a policy of not having an IVR at the contact center. We have an IVR tree on the phone and in that you have an option of connecting to an agent. One reason why voice biometrics has not taken off is the high cost. I recommend creating a consortium because ultimately it is a bank of voices that need to be accessed.

Kersy Tavadia, CIO, BSE

Whenever you are innovating, your learning curve is very tough. It is easy for competitors to copy as they do not have to make those mistakes. So, innovation is very short lived. The entry barrier for a broker to enter the market has been lowered considerably. He just needs a computer or mobile. There is no infrastructure barrier for him. Earlier, technology and telecom were very complex. Not any longer. We also have help desks in regional languages.

Before educating the customer, we train our own staff, particularly the sales staff. We did this because many salespeople come back to us stating sales is not happening because customers are asking for certain features, whereas those features are already there but the salesperson is not able to explain. Typically, IT keeps developing tons of features, but not more than 20% are used.