We are moving from high net worth to mass retail: Dipak Gupta

Dipak Gupta, joint managing director at Kotak Mahindra Bank, is virtually No. 2 to Uday Kotak. He speaks about the bank’s latest mobile push. Excerpts:

How did the push into mobile banking come about?
All along, we had targeted a segment that we call the mass affluent. It did not make sense to go beyond and have large branches. The cost of serving customers was higher. Having built our products for one segment, we never really looked at other segments. Post demonetisation, the government started pushing digital, and came up with some path-breaking facilitation for doing KYC based on Aadhaar number.

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Physical verification could be replaced by Aadhaar-based verification with an OTP sent to the phone. It brought down the cost of customer acquisition and also the time — from three to seven days, it has now become just a minute over the smartphone. This is not something that has been in the works. We have created the offering in the last few months after demonetisation.

What is the cost of acquiring the customer?
It is as low as Rs 100-500, almost 80% lower than what it was earlier, and because costs are low we can live with a zero-balance account.

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Will this offering help you double your customer base?
It is a change in our customer category. We are moving from high net worth to mass retail. It has fallen into place because of the opportunity and the December guideline by RBI allowing Aadhaar-based KYC. Now we have to execute this.