Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, IIT Kanpur successfully organized Pragyan, the guest lecture series of annual business conclave Prabandhan,16. The second seminar of the series by Mr. Manish Agarwal, Senior Vice President – Digital marketing & Innovation, Kotak Mahindra Bank, focused on “Digital Marketing and Disruption in Finance”. In an enlightening seminar, he talked about the changing trend in marketing from traditional to the digital marketing where technology plays the pivotal role. He enlisted three critical dimensions which are driving this paradigm shift, namely: Hyper Adoption, Digital Disruption, and Customer Experience. These three dimensions are changing the entire marketing arena which has now become an end to end process. To drive the point home, sir gave the example of Tesla motors, which launched a new model in April 2016 and within 36 hours they received about 400 thousand bookings even before its industrial production had begun. This indicated the power of digital marketing.
He purported that the digital infrastructure in India was growing rapidly and the number of smartphone users in India shall cross the 650 million mark by 2019. He praised the developments in digital arena, relevant to Banking and Finance sector in India, and talked about the IMPS service which he dubbed as the best in the world! He told that ‘presence’ on the digital platform has become the top agenda for incumbents across all sectors, including the Banking and Finance sector. He stressed on the fact that the regulatory changes are continuously becoming more facilitative with the inclusion of innovative tools and services like ‘Aadhaar-EKYC’.
He laid emphasis on the need to continuously re-invent oneself and talked about how disruption shall be the place where money shall exist in future. The technological developments as told by sir shall involve the masses and cover the majority of the population in near future. He said this prediction is based on the increased willingness of the current consumers to adopt new technology and their readiness to switch to ‘pure-play digital banking services’.
He ended this enlightening session by giving a brief about Kotak’s legendary digital journey and provided useful insights to the audience regarding the current developments and future visions of the company.