Imagine a few years down the line, you wake up one fine morning and you see this very pleasant message from a mobile app that it’s time you upgraded from your Swift Dzire to Volkswagen Jetta. It won’t be a random spam marketing push, infact it will be based on your banking and financial data over the past few years and increment in your income & savings, accounting for trend in increase of your monthly expenditure and after considering all your existing EMI commitments. In a click of a button, you could trigger multiple transactions involving multiple financial and non-financial institutions.
Your used Swift Dzire could be up for sale automatically on a popular car portal that assures guaranteed sale in 72 hours, your old car loan will be closed and new one will be ready on better terms with same bank without any paper-work and your sales proceeds from the old car sale could automatically be your down payment for the new loan. Your nearest Volkswagen showroom would be ready to give you a test drive and their best quote in hand because they know that if you don’t like their offer, you have 5 more options just a click away on the same app. We want to be that app of yours! Chillr could be that and more, your favourite financial advisor or rather your financial concierge service. And we believe in partnering with leading banks & top startups from other domains to make this happen!
Gone are the days when you, or more likely your dad, opened a bank account with a particular bank just because they had a branch in the vicinity of their office / home & the manager of that branch knew or soon came to know pretty much everyone in your family. My dad was a banker with a leading PSU Bank for over 34 years, so I’ve seen how many of his customers were more like family friends to us. Banking was something very personal & relationship dependent. Going to a branch & getting treated like a premium customer was something everyone expected. In fact they liked dropping in to the branch frequently and they invited their ‘Chief Manager’ to all their family functions. It took a lot more than an extra 50 bips to lure an FD to a branch across the street. All banking needs of a person usually would get done at one branch of one bank, in fact the procedure to switch was considered a major pain.
Now things are different, like every other kind of relationship, banking relationship has also transformed. It has become a lot more transactional & digital. Loyalty is a thing of the past. You can switch from one bank to another in a blink. You no longer expect all of your banking needs to be served by a single bank. It is like those days when suddenly there were too many telecom operators in the market and lots of people bought multiple SIM handsets and SIMs. We were at the forefront of that change being a solution provider to major Indian telcos ourselves in our earlier avatar. It was crazy to see the usage patterns, people having different SIMs for SMS, Data, STD calls, roaming and what not based on offers in the market, and that was just a dozen odd telcos! Banking market, flooded today with options from 100’s of banks, NBFC’s, wallets, small banks, payment banks and other financial institutions, is much more complex than that!
Major shifts in consumer behaviour
♦ An average user is a lot more confused & has a lot less time.
♦ Most customers have two or more bank accounts.
♦ People don’t like going to the branches anymore.
♦ Users are shifting to digital channels but experience is lacking.
♦ Customers have started preferring marketplaces to discover products & services.
♦ Wallets offer a better payment experience but loading money into the wallet remains a pain and is still considered as an ‘expenditure’.
♦ Tens of millions of users have taken to wallets though they trust the bank more when it comes to their ‘savings’.
♦ High value customers don’t get lured just by incentives & offers.
♦ User expects a central app for everything in each domain like they have for cabs, movies, flights, hotels etc.
Industry is also changing rapidly
♦ With marketplaces mushrooming margins, especially on lending products, banks are under tremendous pressure.♦ Banks are realising the threat of FinTech disruption & panicking to a certain extend. It is yet to be seen if they can leverage UPI to bridge the gap they have with digital consumers.
♦ Banks will be forced to partner & focus more on their core expertise instead of spreading too thin.
♦ Current & Savings accounts (CASA) are the most lucrative products since margins are wafer thin on other products.
♦ New/Small/Payment Banks will give the incumbent banks a run for their money when it comes to CASA offerings.
♦ There are institutions like NPCI committed towards making Banks accounts a lot more interoperable.
♦ If the bank accounts fix the digital experience, it is debatable if the wallets will continue to have the same relevance.
♦ Unlike yesteryears, a bank doesn’t need thousands of branches across the country to make its presence felt.
♦ Financial institutions have a started generating huge volumes of highly valuable data but it is yet to be utilized properly in the best interest of everyone.
♦ There is an unprecedented amount of interest in the FinTech startup space, there is phenomenal amount of capital flowing into the space & every kid around the corner wants to start a payment start-up around UPI!
Most customers in the middle income background end up having 3 or more bank accounts, thanks to multiple employers preferring different banks & maybe a different bank providing better rates for a car/house/student loan. With the ongoing war between banks to be perceived as being ‘digital enough’, there is a parallel war going on for storage space inside the SD cards of customers’ smart phones. There are users who have told us during our surveys that they sometimes uninstall the wallet app right after a mobile recharge & reinstall the next month when they need it again.
Point being, you might have 3 different bank accounts but you don’t want to keep 3 different banking apps on your phone when you don’t even have enough space for your selfies. Also, it is super difficult to use them since no two bank apps work the same way. Typically there are 75–150 features in each of those apps, 90% of which nobody uses ever, but being a bank you don’t have an option to not give options like requesting a cheque book, a mini statement or starting a recurring deposit.
Which account ends up being your primary account depends a lot on the ease of moving money from the account for your various needs including utility payments, EMI payments, e-commerce etc. rather than just salary credit. One steady trend that we have seen on Chillr is that users end up maintaining more balance with the Chillr linked account as they find it the most easy to operate. This of course is great for our partner banks because often they would have won back customers who have been dormant on their system and higher float means higher margins, thanks to CASA being bank’s cheapest source of funds.
At Chillr, we started off with the pitch of ‘Send money to anyone in your phonebook’ without even having to know their bank account details. Users loved the fact that they could pay their friends in 10 seconds flat. Now that we have a dozen odd banks partnerships with a few million transactions and a few hundred crores processed every month, I believe the timing is just perfect to go out with one of our biggest bets. and. Till now you have loved using Chillr to operate your Primary Account, ‘Now manage all your bank accounts at one place.’ Checking available balances, transacting between your own bank accounts etc would be easier than ever. You no longer have to worry about having 5 different clunky bank apps on your precious smartphone real-estate, you could manage with just one. It is intuitive, seamless & is tuned for the best user experience. To access the extensive set of banking features you can always have your Bank’s mobile app, but for the most frequently used banking transactions & payments, you have Chillr.
Like how a MakeMyTrip/BookMyShow/Zomato brings all your Airline/Multiplex/Restaurant options at one place, Chillr hopes to do the same for banking.
More importantly, we partner closely with your favourite banks to bring products & services most suited for your requirements exactly at the right time when you need it in an extremely intuitive way. Essentially we believe that the importance of relationship between the bank and the customer remains equally important as decades earlier, just that your smartphone is now your branch and your then favourite bank manager is now in the ‘cloud’ (well not literally!). It is all about the experience and the user-experience in a digital era is probably handled better by a tech startup that is only focused on that which also lets a bank focus more on its core functions.
A wallet prompts the user to move money out of their bank account before the actual spending event and a lending marketplace pushes banks to fight with each other for customer’s attention, confusing the customer with too many options. We hope to create win-win situations for both the bank and the customer. We save banks from losing its float & customers from losing interest income. We ensure that our partner banks are richer in terms of data, insights and unlock new revenue streams while customers get tailor made solutions to their banking needs.
In today’s era of convenience with the likes of Uber, Swiggy and Amazon changing fundamental user behaviour in their respective domains, customers’ expectations have skyrocketed and banking products conceptualized decades back have not been able to keep up with it. Our expertise is in building a great user experience by integrating deeply with the banking systems to simplify complicated banking products & services. The terms and procedures of opening an RD or FD are too hard for a layman to understand even in a savings intensive country like India. Availing short term, unsecured, micro credit right when you need it is still a challenge for the customer. In fact processing it cost-effectively without compromising on default rates is a challenge for the banks too.. We believe there are tons of opportunities to improve products around Savings, Credit, Investments, Wealth Management, Insurance, Broking etc and a few of these problems are interesting for us to solve for the benefit of our growing user-base.
Our average user has 20+ sessions in a month on Chillr (phenomenally high for a banking app). If the customer had hypothetically used an ATM or dropped into a branch even half the times, the cost which the bank would have had to bear is prohibitive. Here we don’t just save money for the bank in servicing the customer but also increase the number of times the customer reaches out to the bank (though digitally) and how deeply the bank gets wired into the customer’s day-to-day life. A decade from now, we would not need all the 1000+ banks (cooperatives included) we have in the country nor the 100,000+ branches out there. There will be mergers, there will be acquisitions, there will be bankruptcies. In essence after all the consolidations we might not need more than 30–40 big banks to serve the length and breadth of this country. There could always be many more surviving by serving niche use-cases and target segments, I’m talking about the HDFC’s & SBI’s of the world. We hope to be instrumental in accelerating that process! In fact we hope to help our partner banks get to that top slot or discover the best value at the time of consolidation by having the best engagement levels with customers and for generating maximum per capita revenue!
