HDFC brand was not built on communication and that's the first message that we all take for ourselves. This brand was built on redefining what banking is and delivering on that redefinition, said Ravi Santhanam, Chief Marketing Officer, HDFC Bank while speaking at the 10th anniversary edition of Kantar BrandZ India event.
In his keynote talk, Santhanam outlined how the Indian banking system had a problem in 1969 and how nationalisation was the solution. At that time, all Indian banks were nationalised, he shared. “Today, when the banking system has a problem, the solution is to privatise the banks and how did it change happen in India? It happened because of HDFC Bank,” he said.
He highlighted that HDFC Bank is run by a group of professionals, not promoters. “We are 100% owned by the public and no promoters even today. And these groups of professionals came together and created something which we all as Indians can be proud of.”
He added that this was always built on defining what is going to be banking and delivering on these expectations. “The products and services with technology are an enabler and setting really phenomenally great service standards. What it does in terms of an emotional benefit for the consumer. It created what is called trust. People can trust us with their money."
According to the 10th edition of Kantar BrandZ Top 75 Most Valuable Indian Brands Report, HDFC Bank ranked second. “We are very happy to be the seventh largest bank in the world and we want to be much more. Today, we have almost 8.25 crore customers and the group that has come together we have 10.5 crore customers that we serve day in and day out.” Santhanam further stated that communication has played a very small supporting role in this.
He shared that HDFC Bank has phenomenal marketing analytics. He said, “We found the trust definition has changed. Earlier the definition of trust was 'I will trust you with my money.'" Today, it's about trusting banks with customers' first-party data, according to Santhanam. "So we need to have invested in marketing analytics. I have an 80-member data science team sitting inside marketing, looking at big data on the cloud, doing phenomenal analytics to understand each and every transaction and interaction the consumer does so that we can bring it all together to become more relevant for our customers and that further increases the trust.”
He also shared that it's important to be a bit more consumer-friendly. “We have the power of almost all the top brands here. We work with them as a banker to them, so we have the ability to bring it all together. Instead of participating with them, we decided to create our own properties and hence we created festive treats.”
Speaking about how banks can differentiate themselves from others in the space where almost every bank looks very similar and does almost the same products and services. He shared that the way they can differentiate is going to be on the basis of their services. He said the digital way of doing things will allow them to enhance the services.
He also spoke about the major concern people are facing is fraud. “We found fraud to be the one which is actually hurting people. Almost $130 worth of fraud happens every month. People lose money through sharing OTPs.” The brand launched a new campaign, 'Vigil Aunty', to encourage people across the country to practise safe banking habits.
“If you're not in the experience business, you're not in business, and this is especially true for banking as a sector and banking as a category. And it is on the pillars that we will continue to concentrate our efforts,” he concluded.
