HDFC Bank will introduce a fully revamped mobile banking application (app) in the next four months. This would significantly improve customer experience and security, Parag Rao, group head (payments, consumer finance, liabilities), HDFC Bank, told FE.
“They are right now in a beta stage. The objective is to change the back-end engineering construct of the apps to make them completely new-age digital platforms,” Rao said.
Currently, the lender has over 32 million customers on its mobile application. The bank’s mobile app and net banking website had deep linkages with the back-end systems and are being decoupled, he said. The changes would lead to the channels becoming more resilient, Rao added. In the event of outages in any particular system, the mobile banking services will continue seamlessly, he said.
The bank has also revamped the security infrastructure of both these channels, given that frauds have increased while the turnaround time for frauds has fallen.
“One cannot clone the bank’s app, phishing and vhishing will become harder, and therefore, it will probably be the safest app to use,” Rao said. He added that the bank will introduce multiple customer security features, including two-factor authentication and Face2Face IDs.
In December 2020, HDFC Bank was barred by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from issuing new cards and launching new digital initiatives after instances of technological outages. The regulator lifted all the curbs after a 15-month period when it was satisfied that the bank had corrected its internal systems.
The revamped mobile app will have 185-190 features to begin with, which will go up to 245-250 in the next 12 months. The bank has also looked at how it can integrate and link the back-end of multiple bank entities and apps within the HDFC Bank mobile app itself. For example, if a customer wants to access PayZapp through HDFC Bank, she would be able to do so and the same feature will be added for the HDFC Sky app.
“Mobile banking has always been a customer servicing app, but we have added one module of being able to acquire non-bank customer through the app. We will let them apply for various products wherein even without registering with us, they can apply for products on one touch,” Rao said. The bank’s revamped website will be launched later in phases, after the mobile and integrated net banking features become live.
Partnerships with fintechs
According to Rao, fintechs are helping the lender reimagine ways in which customers consume products, various user journeys, and are also helping to build resilient digital platforms. The bank has partnered with fintechs for its PayZapp app, Mintoak and back-end programmes; it is looking to onboard partners for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), local language models and machine learning, and to build bots and voice language tools.
Using fintechs for cloud services and data lake optimisation can also help the bank with handling its large data set of customers efficiently. Moreover, it can enable instant credit underwriting and building marketing models, Rao said. The bank’s latest co-branded credit card partnership with Swiggy has nearly 300,000-350,000 customers and is showing faster adoption, he added.