Our approach is built around hyper-local marketing: Venkata Swamy, HDB Financial Services

In a country where aspirations are rising faster than incomes, access to affordable finance has become the key enabler of dreams. While traditional banks remain bound by regulations and strict customer profiles, NBFCs like HDB Financial Services step in to bridge the gap, serving India’s vast underserved and underbanked population. For HDB, the mission goes beyond lending; it’s about reimagining opportunities by blending affordability with aspiration.

Venkata Swamy, Chief Digital & Marketing Officer at HDB Financial Services, highlights how the company is building products around real cash flows, driving hyper-local engagement, and deepening financial literacy through initiatives like Arthik Arogya Kendra. At the same time, With AI and MarTech enabling scalable, insightled personalization, he explains in this interview with exchange4media how HDB is carving its distinct space in a crowded NBFC market - where local trust matters more than mass visibility, and the opportunities that lie ahead in advancing financial inclusion.

Edited Excerpts:

HDB Finance operates in a highly competitive NBFC space. How do you differentiate your brand in the eyes of consumers compared to both traditional banks and fintech startups?

First of all, the Indian market is huge, there is room for everyone. We don’t worry too much about competition. Instead, we look at competitors only to observe new trends and ideas. For us, everything begins and ends with the customer: Who are they? What are their aspirations? What are their needs? And how do we bring affordability into the equation? Competition becomes secondary because each customer’s aspirations are unique. Our focus is to deeply understand our customer segments and partner with them in achieving their goals. Of course, competition can be healthy, it often signals new opportunities or customer needs we can evaluate. But as long as we are aligned with customer needs, we are confident of being in business for the long term.

How do you integrate brand storytelling with digital-first strategies to build customer trust and engagement?

Our customer base is highly diverse - it’s not a homogeneous market. Aspirations vary dramatically, even within the same state. A customer in Amravati might think very differently from one in Nagpur or Mumbai. That’s why we believe one-size-fits-all doesn’t work.

Some customers need complete hand-holding; others prefer fully digital journeys. Our strength lies in being able to cater to both, thanks to our 1,700+ branches across 1,200 cities. The key is blending customer aspirations with local market knowledge. For example, cash flows for a small mom-and-pop store in Mumbai are very different from one in Nagpur. Loan offerings must reflect these differences. That’s why we rely on both digital capabilities and strong ground presence.
We also believe in “assisted digital.” We have around 30,000 people on the ground, who are not just sales staff but consultants guiding customers through loan journeys and beyond. Technology underpins this entire model, ensuring consistency across geographies.

How has your media mix evolved between traditional and digital channels?

Our approach is built around hyper-local marketing. Each branch operates like a neighborhood lender, with branch managers often knowing their customers’ businesses, cash flows, and aspirations in detail. This makes local knowledge central to our strategy. Whether through ground activations, local events, or targeted digital campaigns, we emphasize personalized and hyper-local communication rather than broad, one-size-fits-all messaging.

For example, in Tamil Nadu, we associate with events like the Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL)—a local sporting property that connects with the community, unlike pan-India platforms such as the IPL. Such localized engagement is critical to building our brand.

In terms of media, we are less focused on print or TV. Instead, we prioritize personalized, ground-level activations and hyper-local digital campaigns. While digital offers efficiency and personalization, it can often be more expensive than traditional media.

Can you share insights into how your ad spends have evolved in the last year?

Our marketing spends have been rising in line with our growth. Over the last 5–7 years, we’ve expanded from around 700–800 branches to 1,700, covering 1,200 cities. Each local market activation comes at its own cost, but technology has made segmentation much more efficient.

With better segmentation, we can reach more customers with the same budgets. Going forward, I believe one-on-one, personalized marketing will evolve further, helping us optimize spends. That said, in BFSI, marketing is not just about conventional advertising. Training our frontline teams is also part of brand building. The way our people interact with customers is a huge component of marketing. Similarly, technology spends also play a role, as they impact customer experience and brand perception. So it’s difficult to define spends as a fixed percentage, it’s an evolving mix.

Do you see influencer marketing, partnerships, or financial literacy initiatives becoming important in your marketing approach?

Influencer marketing is growing in BFSI, but largely in categories like stock broking. In the loan business, I don’t think it carries as much weight. Customers don’t take a loan because a celebrity says so. So, at least for now, influencer marketing is not a critical lever for us. That said, consumer behavior is evolving, and we continue to watch the space. What works for us instead is nano-influencers at the local level. Our customers themselves become the influencers in their community. That peer-to-peer endorsement is far more powerful for us than celebrity-driven influencer marketing.

What is absolutely critical, though, is financial literacy. Since we cater to underserved and underbanked segments, many of our customers don’t fully understand financial products. Educating them is a fundamental part of our responsibility and our marketing approach. Our role, therefore, is not just to offer loans, but to make their financial lives simpler.

One way we do this is through hyper-local marketing at our branches. To scale this, we launched Arthik Arogya Kendras, literally ‘financial health centers’. These centers are open to everyone, not just HDB customers. The idea is to help people understand cash flows, credit ratings, and how these impact affordability of their dreams. It’s about financial inclusion through education.

We’ve now expanded Arthik Arogya Kendra as a major CSR initiative, making financial literacy a core part of our marketing and community engagement.

What are the key success metrics you track for evaluating ROI on both digital and offline campaigns?

We keep it very clear and objective. Each campaign has a defined goal. For example, when we partnered with Haryana Steelers in the Pro Kabaddi League, the objective was pure visibility. Since Kabaddi is the second most-watched sport in India, we measured how often our logo appeared on screen, the visibility angles, and the cost per visibility. It turned out to be extremely efficient. Kabaddi resonates strongly with our segment - it’s action-oriented, community-driven, and far more relevant for our underbanked customers. By choosing Pro Kabaddi, we achieved sharper targeting, better ROI, and stronger alignment with our brand positioning.

Similarly, for customer acquisition campaigns, we track funnel metrics. from leads generated to loans converted, and cost per acquisition. For us, ROI is not abstract - it’s tracked at every stage, whether it’s brand visibility or lead conversion.

Where do you see the biggest opportunity for HDB’s marketing to create impact in the next 2–3 years?

India’s financial services market is huge and growing. Government initiatives like Jan Dhan Yojana have already brought people into the banking fold. Now, the next wave is about extending credit access to those still underserved.

For us, the opportunity lies in building partnerships - with NGOs to drive financial literacy and with manufacturers to design affordable schemes, so that aspirations can seamlessly meet affordability. Equally important is customized product design: our 30,000-strong on-ground team acts as financial advisors, tailoring repayment tenors to match customers’ cash flows, ensuring aspirations are met without financial stress. Whether it’s enabling someone to move from a two-wheeler to a four-wheeler or making premium products accessible, the real opportunity lies in matching aspirations with affordability at scale.

And as marketing gets increasingly shaped by technology, what role do AI and MarTech play in your overall strategy?

AI is proving to be a real game-changer. Just as search once transformed how people discovered products, AI is now adding a layer of reasoning that makes personalization far more powerful, something especially critical in BFSI, where marketing is deeply data-driven.

With AI, we can re-score customers in real time based on their transactions, recommend the “next best action” rather than pushing irrelevant products, and make one-to-one personalization scalable across the customer journey. Combined with MarTech, this is fundamentally redefining our approach, moving us away from conventional BFSI marketing to a model that is tech-driven, insight-led, and hyper-personalized.