Good evening, everyone. Welcome to this very interesting session on HDFC Bank as a part of our India FinTech Forum. Clearly, the key question is whether FinTechs are going to be disruptors or enablers. As the RBI Deputy Governor very nicely put, the competition perhaps is not between banks and FinTechs, but perhaps between banks that use FinTechs more versus banks that use FinTechs less. I think to answer some of your interesting questions and to participate in a very fireside chat session, the Macquarie India Conference, we have with us the senior management team at HDFC Bank, represented by Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, the Chief Financial Officer of HDFC Bank. Parag Rao, Group Head, Payments, Consumer Finance, Digital Banking and Technology. Anjani Rathor, the Chief Digital Officer of HDFC Bank, and finally, Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, the Chief Information Officer, the Chief Technology Officer of HDFC Bank. Thank you. Thank you all the participants and thank you for the senior management of HDFC Bank to participate in our conference and thanks for taking out time today. It's a pleasure, Suresh. Yeah. Thank you. you. Thanks for getting us here. We look forward to that. Sure. Thanks. Okay. Let me begin by addressing a very important question that a lot of people have in mind now that everybody's aware of your revised strategy of opening about 1,500-2,000 branches. Now, on one hand we are talking about being a pretty tech-savvy in digital banking and so many amount of transactions and account openings and a lot of things get done digitally. Whether there is an actual need to open such large amount of physical outlets. How do you look at this proposition, Srini? And maybe you can give us more color on this. Over to you. Okay. No, no, very valid and topical, Suresh, to think about in the current context, what does it mean? Branch means what and why and so on. Right? Very apt in terms of the context. Let me try to give some explanations of what it means, right? See, branch in the bank, right, it is, a branch is a microcosm of the bank itself. That's how our bank runs. Branch is not, one would imagine a traditional or a typical teller counter and an ATM type of outfit with some service kind of counters. No. It is a microcosm of the bank. That means a bank does many things. A branch does many things that the bank is expected and supposed to do, right? Our branch strategy that we have so far followed has paid off well in market share gains and strengthening our position several years that we have done this through, right? The focus here continues to be on low cost granular deposits, right? In the next stage of growth. Which means we do. We're not changing our strategy in terms of how we get. We still need that low cost granular deposit, 81% of our deposit base is retail, and we continue to drive that. Deposit strategy will be the distribution driver, not the rate driven. Which means the deposits we want will be based on the distribution and the reach that we're able to get to the customer. Again, it's similar to what we have done so far. No, not again, different from where it is. To put a context, right, the country's distribution requirement is far and wide, right? The branch density has to increase significantly to capture the opportunity. The market is still very unbanked or underbanked, so to say. Significant deposit share remains with state-owned or local community type of banks. We have an opportunity to see how we could add certain value for a customer relationship and get there. Another aspect to think about the branch itself is, a branch is a congregation place for our sales and relationship management staff. What it means is that if I don't have a branch, we're gonna have an office where our sales and relationship managers are going to sit and function, right? Because today we have about 5-6 km of coverage for our RM, sales and relationship managers to go around in the catchment area to do their business. It has to be brought down to 2-3 km coverage to start with, right? For our staff. We need to cut down their travel, improve their productivity to focus on customer relationship and process. That's one of the important ingredient of how we are thinking about it. A branch is also not just a deposit strategy kind of a center. It is also an asset distribution center where our retail and CRB segments are a fulcrum that operates out of the branches. Branches have got different formats. I don't want to leave a thought that the branch is a single, kind of a place or a size, and an outfit. It has got varied sizes and houses anywhere from three, four people in some branches. Can be 10, 20 or more or in a metro in Mumbai, one of the busiest, if you go there could be 50 people sitting there. These are different formats that we have. The branches that we are reimagining are also technologically advanced, right? The ones that we are doing. Our digital branches construct would be leveraging new age technology components, right? To facilitate our RM assisted experience. These technologies are like, you know, today's internet or wireless instead of a traditional closed loop networks, right? It will be high-end cloud security construct. This would enable for a faster rollout. The new technology enables faster rollout of branches, which is what we have done recently and we continue to operate in that kind of a mindset. See, the latest branches also allow video interactions with customers. For example, with the SME sitting in various other geolocations, it provides an assisted journey construct, which we believe is very essential for our tier two, three, four deeper geography construct that we are having. Pure unassisted digital journeys are critical. In urban metro construct. For deeper penetration, we will continue to focus on assisted mode journeys, and these digital branches will be a great lever for the same, right? Let me say that the branches are physical enablers for our sales relationship managers, and the journeys there are purely digital. With that, I hope that I gave you a background of what a branch means and why the branch construct is very critical to our distribution and execution strategy. Yeah, I think that's clear, Srini. Parag, you want to add something here, more than what Srini has said? Okay. To only add, when we look at even the current digital landscape, and I sort of break it up, you see a significant portion of the kind of sourcing which you do, especially new acquisition, still happens in an assisted manner, especially when you go to the deeper geography. We tend to sort of get a little bit skewed by us sitting in the cities thinking that everyone, everything is 100% unassisted. The reality of the matter is that even as high as 70-80% of a lot of the so-called digital journeys are assisted journeys. Okay. That, as we foresee and given our experience in the ground, especially in the deeper geographies, will be a reality in the foreseeable future. We need to be prepared for those kind of situations, and hence branch. While the branch expansion, I think the nature and the nuance and the flavor in the branch, exactly as Srini explained, will be sort of carried forward. Okay? It will be a place where people come to do a lot of the digitally assisted journeys. In fact, the initiative by the RBI on raising DBUs, in fact, is exactly a step in that direction, wherein they've taken on sort of one more or they've put on one more very important, you know, KRA, if you may call so, on the banking system to say that how do you create these digital banking units which are essentially physical locations where people can come to, but actually avail of and experience strong digital journeys. Some of them assisted, but many of them unassisted. that this whole flavor of digital is spread out into the deeper geography, and that is the core mission of India. Hence, banks will actually carry forward a lot of these journeys. A lot of the new technologies which we are sort of already adopting in various parts of the bank will be deployed in these DBUs and, you know, Ramesh and Anjani can sort of take you through a little more of those details. But fundamentally, these will be showcase places where customers can come in the traditional way of a branch in a physical place where they can interact with warm bodies and branch officials. But I think they can conduct a lot of their transactions which they hitherto did in a physical mode, in a semi-assisted mode or even a completely digital mode. Okay. The DBU is actually an institutionalized mechanism in which RBI sort of clearly understood that this is the reality in India for the near future. A lot of the new technologies will apply here and, you know. That's what I think we wanted to add. We're just seeing what's happening on the ground and adapting to what. Mind you, the branch is one of our strategies. Obviously, our initiatives on doing completely digital through the website, through our Adobe journeys forms, which we are doing through changing customer UI, UX and a lot of the other customer-facing digital journeys, which we'll talk about subsequently. Those will continue, obviously, but this is one of the initiatives where we need to be, I think, cognizant of the fact that in India there will still be a large proportion of assisted digital journeys which will exist and we need to be ready for them. Yeah. You know, extending this conversation on Digital Banking Units. Anjani, we would like to have your thoughts here because for a bank like HDFC or any of your large competitors, a lot of these things were anyways being done. What is that this Digital Banking Unit offers to you in the sense as an organization? What exactly is changing here with respect to the landscape? Or it is just like, it's just another more concise or a precise way of doing the business? Anything that you can give us a color on what exactly changes with the Digital Banking Unit guideline. You know, at the Digital Banking Unit, it gives us an opportunity to bring all our customer journeys, which are zero touch, paperless. Each of these customer journeys can be exposed at these points where a customer can, you know, walk in and, you know, conduct himself or herself completely through an assisted journey, or there will also be a bank staff present during the banking hours to support a customer. Now, this becomes a way to manifest all the journeys and the work in digital that banks have been doing through these Digital Banking Units. It becomes a good way to educate the citizens, who are there in that catchment, and later on also take it through unassisted manner, you know, across the entire digital landscape. DBUs is going to help propagate digital banking, as we move forward. Okay. I just wanted to also add here. Yeah, please. Yeah. On the DBU side, Suresh. I think the construct of the DBU is also changing, like, Srini alluded to the technology. A lot of cost goes in the backend technology today in the branches, you know, through MPLS networks, switches, routers, you know. What we are doing here is we're changing the paradigm by using a new set of technologies, okay, which is largely cloud enabled, very secure, proxy driven technology. We already started the rollout. We also believe that, you know, that the way we also look at setting up the branch technology costs, right? Those also will dramatically change. The capabilities also will go up. That's another thing that's changing on the ground, the DBU construct that we are kind of taking it forward now. This is pure leverage on the network side, Suresh. Some of the very new-age connecting technologies have come through now. Banks have to kind of, again, move to those technologies clearly, you know. That's, I mean, network technologies can go a long way back. We are moving in that direction very, very rapidly now. While we have you here, Ramesh, I think the next question and the most important question for a lot of people is, you've been the tech head or the CIO for the last 18 months, and what exactly do you think was something that HDFC Bank had to do in the last 18 months? You know, since this was an India Fintech Day, a lot of Fintechs obviously pride themselves on the fact that they don't have big monolithic architectures. They're far more nimble, better technology, better UI/UX. I mean, in a large bank like HDFC Bank with a lot of legacy systems, how easy or difficult it is to change the entire technology architecture and are we really, do you think, on track to move towards a pretty state-of-the-art tech system? Anything that you can tell us what was lacking and what has been done in the last 18 months, that would be great. Yeah. Suresh, first of all, I think we just want us to clear this myth that there was something lacking and something was weak. See, bank, HDFC Bank was digitally enabled for very long, right? There's a lot of foundational technology that we've been using for very long. What essentially happens is that when the new technology, especially the cloud-side technology started coming up, there are fintechs, you know, who were kind of on the sidelines, who can rapidly scale up onto SaaS model. Because, you know, they are what they are. They are fintechs. They don't have a regulated entity. Putting them quickly into a cloud-enabled SaaS model is far easier. There are risks around that. I mean, if you go deeper into it, in terms of the security construct, the regulatory, you know, views. That's where I think fundamentally one has to look at it. When we do this cloud transformation, which is very essential because the kind of digital ecosystem that India has built over last three, four, five years, there is no way that you can do it on on-prem, on the classical technologies. So both the entity, whether the Fintech or the banks, both have to transition. Just that the path that is being taken by HDFC Bank would be slightly, you know, more rigorous, so to say, and it has to be in line with the regulatory and security requirements. I think most of the fintechs today go on a SaaS approach, Suresh, where they just take a public cloud instance, you know, on top of it, they build their application and you're ready to go. Then, you know, if you have to go through a full security assessment, looking at the encryption, the data key, you know, putting in the perimeter security and a lot of those kind of things start coming up, right? Cross-border jurisdictions. A lot of those kind of items start coming in for a larger entity. What we have done over last 18 months is we've very, very clearly realized first that we need to enable the cloudification. I don't know if you know that, but, you know, we're one of the fastest cloud adoption landing zones in the country today. We have a landing zone, which we created in last six months, Suresh, which technically has now connected us to three large clouds. Not just one. We have a cloud connecting to AWS, cloud connecting to Azure, and a cloud connecting to Google. This is a very different construct. In fact, the way this construct happens is fairly in line with what the regulator thought process is. Why is it that? Because in all of this, the perimeter security is completely, you know, still in line with the traditional ingress, egress approach, where the bank controls the perimeter security. At the same time, it allows you to use the entire cloud computing of the public cloud like AWS or Google. What we've also brought in is something called a very interesting concept called Bring Your Own Key, where we are actually encrypting the data, even in the public cloud, using our own keys in the bank. This gives a far higher construct, and this is fairly, you know, I would say, looked at, scrutinized by the regulator, and they are fairly in line. They think this is the right way to go. You will see more and more banks, more and more Fintech being pushed to this construct. We were off the blocks, like I said, in the last 6-7 months. We've actually been able to put the landing zone. We've started getting a lot of our cloud app new applications. This is a case our, you know, new auto application, our new customer experience hub, our merchant application. All of them are cloud driven, cloud-borne. What we've also done through this landing zone construct, Suresh, we also enabled fintech. We spoke about how we partner with Fintechs. Today, when you partner with, you know, with the Zeta, the Sprinklr, and some of those fintech companies, you need to provide them a cloud environment and you need to also give them a DevOps pipeline which is in line with what they can rapidly develop. This is what our landing zone construct has given. The first thing that we've been able to do is we've been able to first get the entire cloud construct done, and then we have started onboarding each of the new age digital platforms onto the cloud rapidly in the same agile way that a fintech would normally do. What we are also doing, so while we do this strategy, parallelly, we are also refactoring our traditional applications into cloud-ready, and that's where the enterprise factory construct comes in. Clearly we are hitting this whole strategy. We are, we kind of, you know, taking it from all these flanks actually. One is to really first create a ecosystem, allow the Fintechs to come and develop and co-create with you. At the same time, you also create your own capabilities to go on cloud. This is what, you know, I would say is a fairly different strategy. In fact, we are on the ground rolling, like I mentioned, multiple applications have already started being rolled out onto the cloud's infrastructure. We'll do more of this as we rapidly scale up. That is where I think the capabilities will come up rapidly in the growing quarters, I think. I hope that answers the question. Yeah, yeah. Pretty clear. Thanks so much, Ramesh. Maybe we can move on to some of the really new developments or quite a lot of contextual questions. One is, Parag, maybe you can tell us whether this credit card on UPI thing is it really a big thing? I mean, we are not clear whether MDRs will be allowed on this or not. So would you do more RuPay-based cards? And really, is there a big potential to scale up this business in a big way? I know we are in the early stages, but as the cards head also and a payments product head, how do you look at this particular thing as an opportunity? So the way we look at it is I think there is I think far more good than I think negative to this kind of a move. UPI is quickly, you know, rapidly over the last 3-4 years has become a very significant payment mode for most consumers, especially for small ticket transactions. I think the introduction or the linkage of currently today RuPay cards, but then obviously there are moves to see that other cards also get sort of linked to the system, is a means in which you can actually extend credit right on top of that direct debit transaction. To that extent, I think it will only open up and make this transaction even more attractive for you and simultaneously also drive a lot of usage onto credit cards. Okay. That's clearly something which we see happening. On one side we've always been talking about cards being under-penetrated and how whilst it's grown from 30 million to 75 odd million, but then when is that actually big ramp up? I think this move is one of the steps, I think, which is only gonna help rapidly increase adoption of credit cards. Especially on the kind of transactions and using credit cards for a lot of smaller ticket transactions because it provides you that OD or that credit, which is today not present sort of in a typical UPI transaction. Even when you have UPI OD, it's still a little bit of a cumbersome process. This I think is only good for a positive move. Because it's an incremental step of providing credit, I'm sure, while I know discussions are happening, I'm sure the economics of the transaction will obviously be sort of taken care of. Okay? Net-net, I think it's a good move. It's a good move, and you'll obviously also see larger issuance of RuPay cards happening across the ecosystem. I think Does it really change the approach of selecting your card customers? Because one of the biggest opportunities that fintech always says that, you know, not everybody has access to a card. Cards are not being issued to people who earn INR 20,000-INR 25,000 of salary. So that doesn't change, right? Parag, your criteria for giving credit card to a customer will still remain the same, right? You're muted. Sorry. Parag, yeah. Absolutely right. I mean, finally one has to understand that, right, the card is a credit product and you need to apply the principles of good credit and underwriting on an asset product when you come to lending. Okay. I don't see dilution of norms. I think it only makes access to credit for customers a little more easier. It only makes access to credit at the point of purchase a little more easier. Obviously, when you use data and couple of data, and I'm sure I can keep on talking about how when you look at overall data, UPI data, for example, if I'm an acquirer which also acquires the UPI transaction and the card transaction, we can look at all that data aggregated, put together, and use AI, ML and actually underwrite the customer slightly better, which helps me give incremental numbers in terms of credit underwriting. But you're right. Fundamentally, the credit underwriting approach is not gonna change. With the advent of more data and monetization of data, we can probably. It will help us fine-tune our scorecards and be able to give more credit on the fly. Okay? Those are the obvious advantages and benefits which will happen through this whole means. Maybe the next question is on UPI Lite. I think both perhaps Anjani or Ramesh can answer this. Obviously, one of the biggest issues with UPI was it was clogging the entire CBS system in a big way. I mean, moving transactions to UPI Lite, can this be another big moment in the overall payment space, whereby by declogging the CBS network, it gives further impetus for the banks to invest in the UPI systems and also for that matter, you know, move certain kinds of businesses which are earlier being done by Fintechs to the wallet side. Any color on this would be great, Anjani or Ramesh, if you can throw us. Yeah. I'll take that question on the core banking side. Yeah. Yeah, definitely, Suresh, because see, what was happening is that today the core banking, you know, largely was taking all the load up to, you know, any amount, right? A 5 rupee amount, a 10 rupee amount could kind of come into the core bank. You know, banks have reacted to that. In fact, for example, our story on UPI has been extremely good because what we did was we basically containerized, cloudified the entire UPI architecture. That's why you see our technical declines on UPI has been remarkably low over last 1 year. You know, you just need to move forward and look forward. What UPI Lite does is that it allows you to do an offline transaction in that sense. It allows you to, up to a particular wallet limit, you can just kind of, you know, clear it off without hitting the core banking. What this also provides is it also facilitates very nicely with the new technologies, Suresh. You know, the customer has the full choice without you loading up the core bank. That allows us a lot of flexibility to offer- You know, many more, I would say, products or offerings basis UPI, because suddenly our systems get little bit more eased. So clearly it's a very forward-looking move, and I do see that being a good game changer in the kind of you know small ticket transactions the way they are handled. So we are quite positive about this move, and it just helps the industry across all the banking you know ecosystem and not just our bank. Banks that can quickly harness the technology, you know. Another example, a lot of this would come as back-ended memory-based clearances. You don't need to really go back to the database. That's where the real meat of this technology lies, you know. Very positive move. I'll let Anjani kind of add to it. Sorry, let me add to it as a, with an analogy. If you recall, Suresh, almost 15-20 years back, you know, in the FMCG space, when the companies introduced those paisa packets or the sachets, you know, that was when actually the penetration of things like shampoos, toothpaste, et cetera, really took off. Yeah. In the smaller areas. Because you basically brought down the price point and brought down the quantity of purchase and the burden on customers. Okay? That actually revolutionized the usage of a lot of branded products. In a similar way, in the payment space, this whole delinking of, while it's a back-end thing, but what's gonna happen is, you know, making these offline transactions will drive a lot of significantly more still small ticket value transactions which still today happen on cash or offline, et cetera. You think. I draw that analogy. I think it's a good move. Okay. Let me Yeah, sure. Let me move to another interesting question is on Account Aggregator system. I think it's still we are in the early stages. Do you really think this could be perhaps some kind of a seminal moment for the entire banking industry? Does it really open up a lot of opportunities either in terms of better underwriting, either in terms of better customer onboarding and yeah, how has been your initial experience? Are there any use cases that you're willing to share the benefits here? We are also getting feedback that the sharing of data is not great by some banks. Those kind of initial teething issues are there. We're also hearing that till SBI comes on board, this is going to be a tricky thing. We want SBI, the biggest one, to fully participate. Any initial thoughts that any one of you can, like, give on the Account Aggregator system and how you're looking at it? Maybe Anjani or anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. I'll take this, Suresh. Yeah. On the Account Aggregator front, you know, we were one of the first few banks to integrate, and also therefore were able to see the early signs of how this is working. Now, you know, almost, in all the lending journeys where we need a bank statement from our customer, today customer is presented with multiple choices. A customer has the ability to upload a PDF statement. A customer has the ability to go onto a net banking, mobile banking, and provide access to bank statement. Alternatively, Account Aggregator has emerged as a very safe and a secure way of exchanging data for citizens of this country. Now, the drop-offs that we see on Account Aggregator is definitely far superior to a physical statement or a PDF upload that customers used to do earlier. That's a big plus. If you have 100 people coming in, a majority of customers are easily able to go through this journey and give you a bank statement, which means that if it is needed for unsecured lending or in several of the lending journeys, it becomes far more easier to close that case, digitally. This is a good development. It's a public infrastructure and a public good that has been created across the country, and it is yielding some positive signs of showing that this will scale up in future. On the other hand, not every bank has joined this momentum yet. There are some banks who are in the process of integrating because one by one banks have come in. We've also read in the papers that even finance ministry is encouraging banks to come and join, which will be a big plus. If all the banks join in, then, you know, any customer is able to share any bank statement from any of the banks here. That will be a big plus again, if other banks are able to join faster. Let me add, Suresh. Yeah, sure. Go ahead, yeah. Srini and sir. See, the Account Aggregator, essentially, I mean, if you have to give it in one, two sentences, what it has done is that it has taken down the physical barrier to get details, visibility on account into a digital form. Instead of getting a PDF statement and looking at the transaction types to make an assessment or prepare a scorecard, you've got a digital form to do that. That's one critical differentiation that it has brought. However, the competitive advantage always remains only on the scorecard. That means you can get a physical PDF statement or go through a digital process of Account Aggregator and get the details. What remains as a competitive advantage is how good is your scorecard to evaluate. That is proprietary to every bank. That is where the differentiation is, all about. Is your scorecard good? You make use of this digital process instead of a traditional physical process. Sorry, Parag, you were saying. No, no problem. Suresh. Yeah. I think one clear benefit of the Account Aggregator system. I'll go back once again to the time when the bureaus were sort of getting into place, especially after the 2008, 2009 sort of debacle. Globally, in India especially, is that I think one very underplayed benefit of this thing is that because of democratization of data and easy access to data, I mean people giving and also people being able to read, I think it brought about a very strong consciousness amongst consumers and et cetera, et cetera, of the need to have a very good, clear credit score. Okay. That is a very subtle but extremely important, I think, if you may call a sentiment, which actually brought about good underwriting practices post 2008, 2009. Okay. CIBIL actually helped that. There were initial fears that, you know, my God, if people share data, then, you know, everyone else will have access to that data. I think by far the benefits of aggregation of data and, you know, democratization of data I think only helped in the positive run. Similarly, Account Aggregator too, we see it as a way in which, like I said, data being available also brings about some checks and measures and balances on people who are sort of taking lending, et cetera. Like Srini said, yes, but finally the scores and the scorecards will be the proprietary proprietorship of the individual banks and then as number 1. Number 2 is, I think the other key thing which will be the determinant of success is not just about the availability of data, but also the distribution capability and how many points can you sort of expose this whole Account Aggregator piece. Okay? Our strategy of using Account Aggregator is that one of the pieces within a larger distribution and digitization strategy. It's a very positive move as we see it. Great. I think the next question is, clearly, you know, the UI/UX interface, and you know, the various platforms that you have got, the PayZapp and the SmartBuy ecosystem. Can you give us any idea about how you're planning to revamp that? What are the timelines that you're looking at from a revamping of that ecosystem? Also, I'm also an HDFC Bank customer and, what exactly is happening is there is not a seamless integration between all these different apps and ecosystems that you have got, right? HDFC Bank mobile app, then PayZapp, and the SmartBuy platform. Is there a particular plan to completely integrate all of them and of course give a better UI/UX interface? What are the timelines here, Parag? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anjani, you want to take it, then I'll add on top of it. I'll take this question, then Parag and Srini. Yeah. We talk about our digital ecosystem. It is much more than our mobile banking and net banking on which our customers come. In fact, we have consciously, you know, kept PayZapp as a payment digital ecosystem for us, which is different from our mobile banking and net banking. This is a choice that we have consciously made, and this is different from some of the other banks who have brought everything together to give a FinTech kind of experience. Now, when we look at our banking experience, what is it that we are focusing on? We are focusing on simplicity, and we are focusing on resiliency and always-on capability of a banking system. If you go onto our mobile banking app, net banking app, it has to be always on. It should be very resilient to be able to handle the kind of scale, and it should be very, very simple to use for any of our customers, whether it is a rural customer or an urban customer, whether it's a old customer or a very young, you know, millennial who's coming in, should be able to perform their banking services there. That's our, you know, thinking on the mobile banking and net banking. At the same time, we do want to engage with our customers. We want to give them the new age FinTech experience, just like many of the, you know, new age technology companies are giving, because it's the same customer who's using Netflix, who's using a commerce app, who's using a, you know, hail a ride app. We want to give them a good FinTech experience or a consumer tech experience, and that is where we are focusing on our newer digital property, whether it is PayZapp, which allows you to make the kind of payment like any other new consumer tech company would allow you to do that. Or it's our new Xpress Car Loan. You would have seen that. You know, any customer in any part of the country can walk into a dealership, choose a vehicle, and is able to take a loan from HDFC Bank to buy or purchase that vehicle completely on their mobile phone. This is possible not just for HDFC Bank customer, but even for new-to-bank customers. Our newer digital properties that we are creating, which is on the fringes of consumer tech, their experience is completely being reimagined, and these are different compared to what our mobile banking and net banking, where we are focusing on simplicity. Now, are they going to merge in future? We don't know the answer yet. What we know today is that we have a two prongs on these two prongs and ensuring that both are working perfectly fine. One is engaging customers, the other is ensuring that it is very simple and easy to use. Okay. Anything else anybody wants to add on this? Srini? Yeah. I can also come in here. Yeah. I think also the UI/UX thing, we, it's not that we are saying we will not work on our UI. We'll continue to kind of have a path on the UI/UX as well. In fact, if you've seen our mobile app itself and, you know, in the last one year we have done fair amount of changes on that from a UI/UX perspective. You would see clearly, consciously, the Play Store ratings have moved up. You know, it's not like we're not focusing on that side, you know, as well. We'll just share some data points here. You know, our customer active customer base on mobile banking app or net banking has gone up by 40% over the last year. Our App Store rating for mobile app has gone up from early 4s to 4.4, which is one of the top few app ratings for a bank here. Our NPS that we measure internally, we have about 200 customer journeys which are exposed on these apps, and after each journey, we randomly pick up a few customers to seek their feedback. Our NPS has gone up more than 2.5 times here on each of these journeys. Typically, on many of these journeys, we see social media mentions across. Now, those mentions have significantly come down. The tonality of those mentions have gone up. Any customer measure that we use and the metrics that we use to measure whether our strategy is working or not, we have seen very positive feedback coming in from customers on mobile banking and net banking, where our focus has been on simplicity and resiliency so far. Great. The next question is on the partnerships with Fintechs. You know, so first, you guys are a behemoth, doing a lot of things on the tech stuff, digital stuff and, of course, a wide range of customers, distribution points and reach. What exactly you're trying to seek out of your fintech partnerships? Because what is it that you guys can't do on your own that you need to really delve into some of these partnerships from whatever benefit it is going to provide, yeah? Parag or anybody else, if you can take this question. Yeah, yeah. There are a couple of things the way we look at partnerships. I mean, yes, very clearly, core infrastructure, core capabilities, core IP is something which the bank will continue to invest in, not just because we're just very large player and we have a significant portion of the volumes, but also again because of risk, operational risk reasons, et cetera. The fact that, you know, you have a significant amount of sort of volume coming through this whole place. That's one area. Okay. Partnerships we look at for two, three areas, two, three key sort of reasons. One, a couple of them not necessarily in any particular order. One is that many of the Fintechs or partners, not just Fintechs, okay, have a good presence in many specific customer segments or areas or geographies where the bank may not have as much of a presence as it is today. The segment is important either today or from a future point of view. Okay. Hence partnering with a like-minded player to jointly offer a good value proposition to customers in that segment does make significant sense to jointly go together. Many of the partners also have very good platforms, especially on the UI/UX basis because that's a lot of their thing. They have the nimbleness and ability to be able to sort of make changes pretty fast, and that is the requirement. That's another sort of reason why we would sort of partner, et cetera. Mind you, the backbone of such kind of partnerships will be that both the partners bring something substantial to the table. I'll talk about the ring fencing which we do. That's another reason why we would sort of partner with this thing. There could be certain areas and businesses which we may not want to invest in terms of the core infrastructure. We would enter into a TSP or a SaaS kind of platform relationship with many of the partners. Once again, because again, it sort of helps to sort of get to the market much faster. There are a couple of reasons, like I said, we would sort of do this. Mind you, two, three things we definitely take care of. One thing. One, partly because of the regulations, you clearly know that data will always reside with the bank. Typically, things like underwriting, if we do get into such kind of an arrangement, sort of to source asset customers, the core credit underwriting, the post scorecards would still remain sort of with the bank. That's, I'm just giving you two examples of things which we would sort of be very clearly focused on. Okay. We obviously would have to abide by the regulatory rules in terms of data privacy, data consent, et cetera, et cetera. The entire setup is, as you know, with the new guidelines, sort of also comes under the whole purview of regulation, to ensure that the entire ecosystem is extremely sort of clear. Okay. Of course, we would like to partner with like-minded brands, because obviously it's also a reputational, sort of, thing, important thing which we sort of get into the bank. Like I said, we can choose our partners. Many of them could be front-ending, customer-facing partnerships. It could be there are also quite a few back-end, if you may call, so infrastructure partnerships which we sort of do. The principles once again remain the same. I'll leave it here, Suresh, and if there are any more questions or we can, Srini wants to add on to that, you can sort of add on to it. Yeah. Yeah. Parag or Suresh, if I add a few things, based on the way- Yeah, please. You think and how it works, right? Yeah. See, we have physical DSAs, right? Traditionally, in addition to our branch distribution, we are in distribution. The sales force, the roaming sales force that we have, and 4 years ago, we added digital marketing. This DSA as a channel. Always existed for a long time, for a reason. That means, even if we have a branch close by, there is a DSA who is sitting next to the branch. Essentially, where we, our branch has not been able to get the products to the customer or the customer has been more kind of comfortable working with this, we do have thousands of DSAs for various products that we have. Now, the way we view these digital partnerships are, these are type of a digital DSAs. For several reasons that Parag articulated, it could be a brand partnership that is leveraged, or it could be a physical, essentially reach related, where customers are more savvy to get onto that platform, and so we bring them back here, existing or new. The way we think about it is how do we think about them as a digital DSA to bring the customer on board for a product. That's how simply we think about it. Okay. That's clear. Just one question, Parag. I mean, generally people obviously wanted to know your outlook on what's happening with respect to card spends, revolve rates. Are you seeing pickup in the economy or the recent rate hikes, inflation? Those worries are, of course, causing some near-term concern. Do you see there is a big difference between what's happening in the metros versus semi-urban, rural areas with respect to, say, spends per card or activation rates? You know, any color which you can distinguish between metro and rural or the semi-urban and rural areas. Yeah. Thank you. During the pandemic phase when all of these restructuring, et cetera, was happening, I think at an industry level, you saw, if you may call so, an exit or temporary exit of some of the so-called revolvers. That's the nature of the beast during that period, et cetera. As a result of which you can probably notice and see across most cited P&Ls and card issuers, the sort of revolve rate would have dropped. We see that already coming back. Now with the sort of lifting of all the other embargoes and a lot of the you know restrictions sort of being lifted, clearly that's coming back. My reckoning is that it'll take about 12-15 months for us to reach the pre-embargo rates of sort of revolve rate. That, like I said, was a temporary phenomenon. It started coming back already. Okay. Coming to your specific question about the differences between metro and rural. For us, I think we would be one of the few banks who would source close to almost 50% of our incremental sourcing, which happens from the SURU areas. Okay. There, therefore we have a good amount of sort of data to look at differences in behavior between a metro customer on a card, et cetera. Clearly, the way we see it is that, and I'll take two metrics. One is what you call the spend per card, and one is the activation rates. Okay. We see actually not too much of a difference in the spend per card between a metro customer and a rural customer, if you may call so. Okay. The difference, however, comes about in the activation rate. Okay. If say the activation rate for a card in the rural area is X, in the metro it would be typically 1.5- 2 times X. That's the activation rate, which means it's a reflection of the number of transactions the customer does on his card. That very clearly I think is a function of the acceptance of credit cards in the SURU market, with quite obviously the acceptance of cards in metro markets is far higher than in rural. That, too, as we see, as the merchant acceptance networks and cards start getting accepted even in deeper geography, that difference sort of going away. Okay. These are the fundamental core differences between the two. Okay. That's great. Just one final question, is there a growing fear in general in the minds of investors that, you know, with the availability of alternative schemes of payment. Of course, UPI is not credit, but nevertheless it's one form of payment much more convenient than using a credit card at times. I myself as a user, call it laziness, have gone ahead and used UPI to make my payments instead of using credit cards in certain places. You are now obviously having a lot of Fintechs who are giving these short-term loans and stuff. Do you think, credit card as a product, or specifically the revolver segment which we are talking about, could be possibly a set of customer base who would actually move on to these kind of lenders in the ecosystem, thereby jeopardizing in general, not specific to you, but in general for everybody else in the system with respect to the credit card business? How do you look at it, Parag? The way I look at it is yes and no. Okay. UPI, obviously, over the last couple of years has sort of gained a lot of momentum, and it's taken a large chunk of the small value transactions, especially, the transactions which are happening in cash. Okay. The way I see it is the overlap between credit cards is still, I think, pretty low. Okay. Having said this, with the growth in UPI, despite, or rather despite the growth in UPI, you've seen all payment forms actually grow, and therefore the overall payment pie has grown. This I see happening over the foreseeable future in India because overall payment, electronic payment penetration in India is still pretty low compared to many other developing and developed economies. I see over the foreseeable future all payment forms growing. Okay. We talked about some of the reasons why and how credit itself will grow. A combination of distribution, combination of increased risk appetite of issuers, combination of things like UPI linkage with credit cards and so on and so forth. Each and every form factor will actually grow. We actually don't see, there will always be some overlap. There's this new increase, change in behavior between customers like you and me also, who also have started using UPI for certain types of transactions. We will continue to use credit for certain types of transactions and so on and so forth. Okay. The way I see it is in the medium term to long term, all payment forms will continue growing. I think the role of banks, the role of payment service providers will be to ensure that you provide the full suite of payment products and make it available for your customers, okay? The customer will finally choose. Our role will not be a credit versus a debit versus a UPI. I think our role will metamorphize into being a full suite, deliverer of payment solutions, and the customer will pick and choose whatever he wants. In all probability, you will see one customer using multiple forms of payments, and the customer, I think, is smart enough to decide which payment form which suits him better. Okay, this paradigm will apply not just on the issuing side, but also even on the acceptance side. Wherein the merchant will not just accept cards, he'll accept wallets, he'll accept UPI, accept QR, so on and so forth, okay? Therefore, the role of payment service providers will be full suite, plug-and-play, one-box solutions, or as we call transformative with, you know, translated into our own strategy. A platform approach to many of these segments, wherein we offer all the solutions in one box. Okay, simple plug-and-play solution. Our SmartHub platform solution to small merchants is exactly that. PayZapp, in a sense, is all payment forms in one envelope, along with an ecosystem of a marketplace built into that. It's a platform approach which we're sort of looking at. I hope that answers your question. Was there anything I missed out, Suresh? No, no, it's fine. I think this is pretty clear. I think the final question is on the merger with HDFC Limited. On the tech side, Ramesh and Srini, are there any integration challenges that you foresee? Can you just guide all the investors as to what could be the thing which we should look out for and what are the challenges that if at all you may face? If you can guide, enlighten us, that would be great. Yeah. Suresh, from a tech perspective, there is no challenge, absolutely. In fact, unlike a bank-to-bank merger, where you'll have to necessarily collapse a core banking system, right? Into one of the systems. Here, mortgage is something that we don't have as a platform, so it sits along very nicely with the existing cluster. You really don't focus on migrating the data and the back-end platform. However, what is critical is how do you get the front-end stitching? Because that is where your biggest synergy lies today, right? In the ability to really, for the customer to have a 360-degree view on both sides. What we are thinking here is that while we do some of the back-end GL-based merger integration, but the focus will largely be on front-end API-based integration solution. What it means is that you really create digital journeys where both customers can look in from day zero on how the relationship on both sides look like. That means a lot of API journeys to be stitched together on the front end. And of course, in the data mining, right? Clearly, how do you kind of identify the common customers, the cross-sell opportunities, and then digitize that journey and push it into the API layer and then the platforms to carry it, your front-end platforms to carry. We are thinking on this merger in a slightly different way. Like I said, we are focused on that part of the journey, the API-fication, the data integration and the digital journey creations. I think that's where our bang for the buck would come through in this merger rather than focusing on the back-end integration. Because it's just one more core system that will sit along with the back-end system, and that can be very integrated through a GL handoff, just like how we do for other retail assets system today. That's it from my side. Make it clear. Srini, you can come in. Yeah. Yeah, Ramesh, thanks for that. Suresh, the way to think about it is we do have a card system that supports cards product. We have certain other system to support our personal loan or our auto loans, et cetera. We have a system that supports our cash credit overdraft and so on. We have a system that supports our savings accounts and current accounts and so on. Now we have another system for mortgage, a low touch, low frequency transaction system, which we don't have, HDFC Limited has got. All we have to do is just bring it on board, right? Lift, shift and bolt it on to our system. Like the way card system is bolted on to our core banking and other front end, this gets bolted on. As Ramesh described, through an API process, it gets the feed into our credit analytics for scoring, for our marketing to get the right kind of propensity of customer cross-sell, and put that into a CRM system for our relationship managers to have a meaningful conversation with the customer on both sides. That's essentially the way to think about how the journey is envisaged. Okay. I think that's very, very insightful. We would really like to thank the entire senior management of HDFC Bank to take out time today and participate on the India FinTech Forum. Thanks to all the participants for joining for the conference, and please do join us tomorrow. Thanks everyone for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Suresh and team. Appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Bye-bye.