Background

In continuation to the last podcast on benchmarks of India’s top 13 neobanks. In this one, we review some of the most innovative practices or features that Indian neobanks have unleashed in the Indian market. There are four compelling innovations that the Indian neobanks bring to the market, in the form of, security, super app, community, and banking the unbanked. To find out more, listen to the podcast.

Top 4 innovative features of Indian neobanks I Ep2 I CX Benchmarks of Top 13 neobanks in India

Speakers

• Manoj Menon, Managing Director, Twimbit
• Varnika Goel, Sr. Research Analyst, Twimbit

Manoj Menon

Hi there, and welcome to the second podcast in the series on Neo banking in India. In the first podcast, we covered benchmarks of India’s top 13 neobanks. Today, we take that conversation a little further. Today, we review some of the most innovative practices or most innovative features that the Indian neobanks have unleashed in the market. And I’m delighted to have Varnika Goel, lead analyst covering the financial services space at Twimbit, back here to have this conversation with us. So welcome, Varnika. Great to have you. Varnika, what are the innovations that you could look at across all these 25 plus banks in India? How do you see that innovation? And what areas are they innovating? How would they differentiate?

Varnika Goel

Thank you, Manoj. So when I say innovation, I think there are four broad categories where these banks are truly identifying innovation. And to begin with, number one would be security because, definitely, security is an essential aspect of banking digitally. And with the ongoing phishing attacks and cyber-attacks, the trust to bank digitally has always been a concern, and which is why we’ve come up with biometrics – two-factor, three-factor authentication. And now, the KYC authentication has also started to become more robust.

The second aspect, what I would say, would be from a community standpoint neobanks are actually trying to develop communities where they bring customers together. They help create an interactivity amongst customers and engage them more, beyond the banking services and transaction and give something which the customers feel engaged with.

The third, we talk about, is more from reaching to the last mile customer. How do you build that network digitally, where you can actually reach out to the masses, where India is largely an underbanked population, and in some cases, unbanked as well.

And fourth, is having targeted value propositions for the customer.

So how do you bring in all types of products and services in a one-stop solution. Actually, thinking about building a Super app, and without the customer moving out of the banking space and juggling between multiple apps, actually consume all the services in a single app itself.

Manoj Menon

Great Varnika, let’s dive straight in. So, which are the top four and maybe, which is the first one that we should cover? In your opinion, one of the most innovative features that these Indian neobanks have brought to the market.

Varnika Goel

Right, so I think what the most innovative feature that we want to talk first about is security. And with security, I would like to take the example of Airtel Payments Bank, because Airtel Payments Bank came up with this concept called Safe Pay, which is a third layer of security, where they’re actually asking for a three-factor authentication after the customer has filled in their OTP. And they have also filled in their password or a UPI pin to authenticate a transaction. Now, what does this third layer of security do.

This, actually, third layer of security is being brought into the system to reduce the phishing attacks, to actually manage cyber-attacks and also build that level of trust with the customer that this transaction is end-to-end secure. And at the same time, it is also ensuring that this activity is happening through an Airtel network intelligence framework, which is actually an AI-driven platform. Where they’re sending out Safe Pay alerts right after the customer is making a transaction, authenticating a transaction through the two layers.

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