Transforming banking with a customer-first data strategy

Transforming banking with a customer-first data strategy

Axis Bank is one of the largest private sector banks in India, offering financial services for personal, corporate, and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) banking to over 50 million customers.

To accelerate its digital journey, Axis Bank invested in Cloudera’s hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI. They needed a solution that could help them integrate cloud and on-premises data, enhance multi-cloud flexibility, and support advanced analytics.

With Cloudera on AWS, Axis had a foundation for transformation. The platform helped the bank drive and accelerate a data-oriented culture across the organization. Now, it can leverage big data, analytics, and AI to enhance profitability, manage risk, and improve operational efficiency.

With a robust data strategy and platform in place, Axis Bank is well-positioned to pursue its vision of becoming India’s preferred financial solutions provider, driven by a commitment to customer-centricity, innovation and operational excellence.

Meeting changing customer needs

Inspired by the digital banking revolution, Axis Bank focused on harnessing the power of data to meet the changing needs of its customers. Traditional banks are now compelled to continually innovate to meet customer expectations for personalized services, seamless and convenient transactions, greater transparency, and robust security measures.

According to Balaji Narayanamurthy, President and Head of Business Intelligence Unit at Axis Bank, this shift encouraged the Bank to transition from a product-centric to a customer-centric marketing approach.

Mr Narayanamurthy said, “By capturing extensive data about our customers, we observed their changing expectations for more personalized, seamless and secure banking experiences. In line with our ambition to use data for good, we set out to build a robust personalization engine to enable this transition.”

With Cloudera on AWS as its foundation, the goal was clear: build a personalization engine that would increase conversions and engagement by making it easier for customers to interact with the bank through multiple channels.

Axis Bank built a comprehensive personalization engine based on Cloudera on-premises, as well as utilizing Cloudera AI for machine learning and analytical use cases. By running Cloudera on AWS, Axis leverages flexible storage capabilities such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to optimize the performance of workloads.

Additionally, Axis deployed all key data functions of Cloudera on AWS to build an end-to-end data pipeline that would enhance data processing and analytics capabilities.

Harnessing data for omnichannel marketing success

The first goal was to deliver highly contextualized, omnichannel marketing nudges. This engine provides personalized notifications and offers on different channels catering to customers' and Relationship Managers’ needs.

The bank maintains extensive customer data, including demographics, transaction history, browsing behavior and preferences. This data, updated daily for over 2,000 attributes of 50 million customers, is stored in Cloudera’s Open Data Lakehouse for campaign execution.

To streamline its marketing efforts, Axis Bank created a one-stop view to capture key marketing actions, such as cross-selling products, deepening customer relationships, and addressing service or regulatory needs. Using a metadata-driven Scala framework, the system links these actions to a reservoir of messages, enabling experiments across ten business lines, including savings accounts, home loans and credit cards.

Axis Bank developed over 17000+ nudge variants, each tailored to specific customer segments and preferences. Advanced machine learning models determine the best communication channels and products for customers, running daily on updated data to ensure personalized and timely campaigns.

The personalization engine integrates with various marketing platforms to send campaigns across nine channels, including SMS, email, push notifications, WhatsApp and banners. To track the performance of these campaigns, Axis Bank set up an automated process called “Control Tower” on the platform that receives the response data (delivery, opens, clicks, conversion) from different platforms and uses the same to make nudges better.

Driving success with advanced analytics and AI

The results of Axis Bank’s efforts are nothing short of remarkable.

• 45% of the term deposits and 70% of instant loans on credit cards are booked via personalized nudges across all channels
• The effectiveness of Axis Bank’s personal loan disbursal campaigns improved by 10%
• Innovative BillPay registration campaigns saw a1.5x boost, measured via test vs control

Cloudera’s platform played a crucial role in these successes while significantly aiding Axis Bank in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and efficiently responding to audit requests. This robust foundation has not only supported its current initiatives but also paved the way for future innovations.

Leading the digital banking revolution with AI

Looking ahead, Axis Bank is exploring more generative AI use cases, such as conversational BI, showcasing its commitment to leveraging AI technology to further enhance products and services for customers.

Mr Narayanamurthy said, “Investing in Cloudera has empowered Axis Bank to fully leverage its data, driving innovation,  efficiency and significantly enhancing our ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

Axis Bank’s journey of transformation and innovation underscores its commitment to innovation and customer-centricity. Leveraging Cloudera’s platform, Axis has enhanced efficiency and personalized customer experiences, positioning itself at the forefront of digital banking.

Want to see where it all began? Explore the original customer story here.