 As we wind up the conclave, our next speaker of the day is Karti Marshan, the President and Chief Marketing Officer, Kotak Mahindra Group. Well, the demonetization followed by the pandemic has transformed how consumers interact with the BFSI space in India and how Kotak Mahindra Group has successfully led this change and made money journey easy for consumers. Well, today he's going to be talking on the topic, how an agile and adaptable mindset aided Kotak Mahindra to remain on top of consumers minds. Well, with this, I'd now like to humbly welcome on the stage on screen Karti Marshan. Thank you so much, Karti, for your valuable time. How are you doing today? I'm well. Thank you so much, Pavna. I'm just going to struggle a little bit to find my screen to share and then hopefully we'll get started. Sure. I don't know why I don't see it. Would you like me to guide you slightly, Mr. Marshan? No, no, I, I know the drill. It's only today I have a while, but I'm a Q where with me just like and you've given screen sharing rights, right? Yes. Yes, all the team has provided. Yes. All right. Okay. Yeah. Perfect. All right. Thank you very much. Like you rightly said, Bhavna, we've all been waiting for this session and I'm guessing we're waiting so that we can wrap up and go home and run up with our books and drinks. But it's been an enjoyable day for me as well. I attended quite a few of the sessions, including Avnish's very insightful talk on jewelry. I've learned a lot both to apply personally on the back of that, as well as from a market year's lens. So it's, I hope that some of what I have to share will add some value to what people have been listening to today. A couple of disclaimers, the Kotak story is a very vast story. So what I have chosen to do is to just cherry pick a few examples in the context of agility and adaptability, which is what you've given me. The other disclaimer is that while there is no doubt that COVID has impelled all of us to be agile and very likely quite a few of us have started to be agile because of COVID. So the meme that went around a lot about COVID being the chief digital transformation officer in many firms, there's a lot of truth in that. But I do think that both adaptability and agility are entrepreneurial mindsets, which if they are not deeply embedded in the firm in the first in companies and founders and people who work in challenger categories or as challengers in categories, if they don't have it, Avnish's show, it's probably a little difficult to hit the road running when adversity or opportunity of the kind that we've seen over the last two years hits us. So what I did was also pulled back a little bit from just the COVID months to look for examples of how Kotak has demonstrated that agility and adaptability actually since the inception of Kotak. And the relevance of that really is to say that we don't need to stare in the face of something as drastic as COVID to beat ourselves to adapt and innovate and so on and so forth. So with that disclaimer, I'll get started. I trust you guys can see my slides going ahead. So I guess you guys recognize the picture on the right. It was the launch of India's first indigenously designed and built car. And the reason for that picture being there is soon after that car was launched within a couple of years, Kotak was present in the car finance space. And as the other image here tells us the marketing may even deadlift and Avnish referred to this in Clayton's words as well, that people really want outcomes, benefits and emotional paybacks. They don't really necessarily want the physical product that we have to sell. From the same lens we knew, and when I say we, I say fly on the wheels in because I wasn't even here when this happened, in those times in the early 90s, if you wanted a car, there was a premium you had to pay just to book it because demand far outstripped supply. And Uday I think was insightful enough and an amazing market here, Uday and his colleagues at the time to come up with the idea that people want cars, they don't want loans, but we have to sell our loans. So here's what we'll do, we will book thousands of cars and tell people that if they take loans from us, they can get their cars immediately, which I think was quite a kickass adaptability idea for its time. Around the same time or a few years later, we found this opportunity in the, we used to, and we continue to serve as the commercial vehicle sector, it's a big part of our portfolio. And in those times, at least we found that during the rainy seasons, the truck fleets found it challenging to run their businesses because in those times, at least the trucks were like this image is showing, they weren't the kind of container trucks that we see today. So business would be lean in those three months and EMI's would be difficult to pay because there was no cash flow coming in. So Kotak actually, at that time, innovated arguably India's first moratorium product where the EMI payments would be nine month payments. So the truck fleet owners who are borrowing money to buy those trucks from us would get a three month holiday on paying for those trucks. And obviously because we were sensitive to their cash flow situation and their income flow equations, they obviously loved us more for it and we ended up being and continue to be a very large player in spaces like this. Another example is when we, and this is something I think very typical of Kotak, we respond to reforms in our sectors in a very agile manner. So on the 25th of October in 2011, if I remember right, RBI deregulated the interest rate that we are allowed to pay on savings account, savings accounts. At that time it was a regulated number and that number was, if I remember correctly, 4% or 3.5, 4% for all banks with deregulation. What that meant was that we could decide what interest if we wanted to pay. It could have been zero. It could have been X. In our case, we chose to pay 6% and we did this literally within a week of that regulation changing and this is an example of the ad that we ran. So again, to be agile, we couldn't have waited for a television commercial. So we started with print and outdoor and we ran this to start with. And we continued to be agile. For example, in the 2012 budget, the tax on interest from savings accounts, there was an opportunity to save some money on the taxes and we used that opportunity to remind people again that they can earn even more money from their savings accounts. So in that sense, we did our best to stay agile in response to every change in the environment and to leverage it for the customer's benefit into really obviously our interest as well. This is an example from a few years later, 2014, if I remember correctly, when we merged the ING Vaishya Bank. The merger obviously to start with is an M&A story. It's something that's interesting to the investment bankers and to the shareholders. But mergers of banks are hugely painful projects which take it on inordinate amounts of time. In our case, we managed to pull it off and make it one bank within, I think, 18 months. But during those 18 months, it was not necessarily a great story to tell customers because ING's customers, if they walked into a Kotak branch, it was difficult for us to recognize and acknowledge them because the systems were different and vice versa, obviously. And yet there was the need and the hunger and the aspiration to tell a story. So what we did, because our network had obviously doubled at the time and one of the actual ease that Kotak had at the time in perception terms was that we had a very small network. And because now this enhanced network was now visible in very exotic corners of the country and at that time, the mood in the country, if you'll remember to circa 2014, 2015, the mood in the country was such that if we found an opportunity to tell a story where we were embracing the very rich diversity that this country has almost as if we were singing the national anthem in some ways, but being able to tell that story, finding meaning of that kind in what is a prosaic mergers and acquisitions story actually brought alive this brand for the consumer in a very refreshing and interesting way. And even today, that campaign ran less than three months, honestly. But even today, every now and then, it gets talked about in both the cocktail circuits as well as with people like yourselves in the marketing and media spaces, obviously, the phrase, we got lucky. It's had that power of alliteration. Therefore, it's very memorable and sticks in the head. And that's something that I thought I'd share. Some examples of, so to speak, shitheading the fan and making the most of that as well. So demonetization happened as we all know, 2016 within again, within a few days, we started ideating it the same day that demonetization happened. And within a few days, we found this very interesting documentary filmmaker, Pankaj Trivedi. We put him on a motorcycle and we said, here's the challenge you have. You will travel across the country for 30 days and you will do a full circle as big a circle as you can make. And from that, the conditions are that you will carry no cash and you will use no cash on your journey for anything whatsoever. Remember, this is 2016. There was no Google Pay. There was no phone pay. There was no Paytm and there was, well, there was Paytm to be fair. I'm talking about that. But we said you will use only Kotak payment instruments, which is a debit card, a prepaid card and Kotak's app. And he did 8000 kilometers in those 30 days, covering a lot of ground, a lot of states. Putting up every night, he was blogging, blogging, putting up videos online. You can see this is just a small example of him at the Taj Mahal. Some amazing eye opening and interesting stories to buy tea. He had to recharge the tea seller's phone account. And that's how he got his cup of tea on the Banaras Ghat, for example. That's one that stuck in my head always. But there are hundreds of such stories. What we did actually was we started it as a social experiment. I really was trying to see whether it's like absolutely possible for someone to be able to travel in this country without cash. Today, it is much more possible, obviously. But in 2016 also, it turned out to be very, very possible, not very easy, but very possible. And it was heartening that we were able to deliver that. And on the back of an event like the monetization to be able to bring alive the power of digital tools and instruments for banking, including in remote parts of the country, is something that we thought was a very refreshing way to reinforce our brand's presence in people's minds in the context of something that was related to money and was top of mind for everybody at that point in time. So that's something we did. Following up with that. So we did that in December, 2016, right after demon happened in November. And within three months after that, we had innovated to be able to open bank accounts without having to meet our customers. So our customers could just download an app, enter their adhar and pan details and Bob's your uncle. Your account was fully up and functional. At that time, we still needed to do a round of physical KYC, but they had allowed all banks a full year within which we needed to do that. So effectively, what that meant was that customers could get up and running instantly, literally instantly using their bank account on their app as if it was a full-fledged bank account with only some restrictions on the amount of money that could come in and go out until the KYC had been done, which we also followed up and started to do. And the story doesn't end there. I'll get to another spin on that in a minute. But what this again did was it opened the doors for people who thought that private sector banks were not for them, that we would spun them, we would reject them, that we would not entertain them because they didn't have enough money. It broke down all those barriers and literally millions of Indians who probably had no bank account but had got very savvy with using mobile phones and smartphones and so on, got on board and the journey actually continues to this day. I'm segueing to a lighter moment. We took Ranveer Singh on as a random measure at a point in time, including for the same product, 811. And along the journey, as we know, Ranveer and Deepika got married and in the run-up to the wedding, we saw an opportunity. And what is now being called moment marketing is what we did with this. So we again, very agilely, what we did was we launched debit cards with Ranveer's face on it. So Ranveer's fans, which obviously are legend, they're incredibly large number of people in this country. To them, this direct message, which was done on outdoor as well as on social, was obviously a spin on the fact that he was going around. So the day he started, they started handing out their wedding invitation cards to their brethren, celebrities, people like Farrakhan, who then tweeted about it and posted it on Instagram or whatever. We followed that up literally overnight again with a message that said, just this card milakya. We didn't even put the Kotak logo on it, but we followed it up with the story about the Kotak debit card with Ranveer's face on it. And we shared that moment with them in some sense of the word. And obviously we got a lot of chuckles and we got a fair amount of appreciation for it. And it helped reinforce again, the fact that the brand was being agile, being in the moment and being sensitive to both what customers care about, what customers are interested in and the context, which is ours, which is money and cards and so on. This is the other loop on 811. When COVID happened, we responded by doing a number of things to start with we put into the hands of our salespeople who are now simply unable to meet our customers at all, URLs. So the salespeople would share URLs over WhatsApps and SMSs with their customers and the customers would use those URLs to enter their details, etc. And then we followed that up with this, which is again, we were driving regulation and in partnership with the RBI with their support. They approved this process where now we could do remote KYC as well. And it became very important in the context of COVID, obviously. But what I'd like to say in this context is that this kind of innovation can't be done when an event happens. You can't start after an event. So you have to be innovating and ideating and being agile and adaptable. In some sense, ahead of the curve. And so a lot of the idea and groundwork was already in place. Not preparing for a COVID like event, obviously. It was just preparing for the possibilities in the space of doing KYC remotely. It's just that in some senses, COVID happened and this was like a full toss because then we absolutely could not meet the customers physically. But we had this product and the service in place and therefore we leveraged it. There's a very sweet story about how we put this ad together as well. This is probably among the first few ads, which was everything about it was zero contact. We send the script to Ranveer over email. The director conversed with Ranveer over the phone. Ranveer was in his home and the director was in his home. Ranveer was shooting this by himself on his iPhone and uploading clip after clip after clip, which put together the whole film. And then we shot a couple of clips on our side. And then all this was done with nobody from either the brand or the agency or Ranveer's team ever meeting physically because the restrictions on lockdown were incredibly severe at that time. But in spite of that, we pulled off what turned out to be an incredibly successful film telling a really simple but an energizing story about how you can open an account with Kotak without leaving your home, without even leaving your sofa, et cetera, and completely all the way up to the KYC process, which is when the account becomes full-fledged. And I'd like to end with this. So we all know that day in October earlier this year when a bunch of social media platforms went down briefly. And we saw in that an opportunity to in some sense express camaraderie in a lighter tone because we leveraged it for the story of our home loan product, which was the lowest rate product on the market. And we told the story on Twitter only at the time. And like again, people like to talk about these things. It comes in the context of moment marketing. So in the middle of the night, we saw this opportunity happen. We saw this event happen and we wrote it and it did fairly well. We received a fair amount of conversation about it and so on and so forth. Very much like the inspiration, which is the original moment marketing example of Odeo Duncan the Dark. Having said that, I also want to place a bit of a disclaimer at this slide, which is that I think sometimes moment marketing can feel a bit like ambulance chasing and just riding on every single moment that feels like, Hey, everyone's talking about it's busy. Let's also get on this bandwagon may not be a good idea. I think it's incredibly important to make sure that you know what your brand boundaries are, what your brand's relevance, what your brand's context is and when the moment happens to see if you fit that context in a seamless, in a gracious, in an elegant way. And whether it takes the brand's message forward, whether it's in line with your platform and your messaging in the first place and only then do them because if you don't, there's a grave risk that A, people ignore you completely or B, even worse, it blows up in your face and then you have to eat a lot of humble pie. So this thing is the trickiest thing in the world, obviously, because the problem is you don't get a lot of time. When something happens, you have to react quickly and you have to be agile and especially if you're a regulated entity like ours, you have lots of compliance and approvals and so on and so forth and all of that can take time. So you have to train not just the marketing department, but you have to train the whole firm as well as your partners to be agile. And in spite of that, you also have to be mindful, careful, respectful at all points in time. So in hindsight, should we have done this? Should we not? Jury will always be out. You'll get it right. Some of the time, very, very few of the times, much more likely you'll get it wrong. So it's therefore it's incredibly important to be very careful and mindful. Yeah, I think that's what I will wrap up with. I hope that's been somewhat useful and entertaining to end the day with. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Martian, wonderful. You know, it's so great to know the journey. And of course, a lot of expertise and experience which you brought about in the entire presentation just took it one notch higher. So we'd love to continue the conversation, Mr. Martian, I know that we've already extended your session, but we do have Nazia and we right now joining us as an editor at Exchange for Media Group. We'd love to converse and have a couple of questions coming in from the audience and her side. So we'd love to have a conversation if that's OK, Mr. Martian. I'm happy to do that. Hi, Nazia. Pleasure to meet you. How are you, Karthik? I'm well. Thank you, Nazia. Good to see you. Same here. I know we are completely out of time. So I'll keep it short. Maybe we can have just one or two questions. So, you know, first is the most obvious questions that, you know, your BFSI space has always been at the forefront when it comes to digital. So when the pandemic hit you, do you believe you were prepared for the challenge when compared to other sectors? So what impetus did the situation provide the sector and the ban? So like I said a little earlier, Nazia, I think our first imperative was to focus on lives, our colleagues' lives, because the people in the branches particularly and a lot of other people who are providing essential services in our space, people who are running the data centers, the call center, all of those, they had to continue working and we had to be very mindful about their safety. Similarly, we had to be very mindful about the safety of customers who still needed to come into the branches for some things. So our first drive was to see what all we could educate the customer that they don't need to come to the branch for. We stripped down the branches to being as lean as possible so that again, we were able to enhance the social distancing, etc. And in the first slush of COVID, all of 2020, it actually served us very well because we, people fell ill, but we were by and large very lucky that we had no casualties at all during that year. On the back of that, actually the next thing we did was to see how we can help solve in the context of livelihoods. And there we did outreach. We went beyond the play of our organization in the sense of whether it was customers or branches. We actually used the might of our CSR money to support communities where large numbers of people had lost their livelihoods by literally organizing grants, going into people's bank accounts or whatever form they were able to receive the money. So we ran a multi-month effort where we were funding people until they regained their jobs or the companies rehired them or whatever it was. So those were things we were focused on first. Once we take those things off is when we started looking at what we could do in the context of business as well. And some of the examples I shared were in those contexts. So maybe I'll wrap up with this one question that I would want to ask you is that, you know, marketing playbook has probably been rewritten multiple times in the recent past, particularly after pandemic. As a marketer, what would you say to your team or to an upcoming marketer? OK, so this is something that I would have said even before the pandemic, but I will say it with much more emphasis now. I would say bring empathy first. Put yourself in your customers' shoes and pain points at all points in time first and try to solve their problems. And in solving their problems, you will invent products and services and you will create value not only for the customer, but also for your firm. The other thing I would say, especially to upcoming marketers is that I know that the skill set journey has moved from the arts, which is the space of being creative and so on and so forth to a lot of math and science with data, statistics and analytics and so on. But I think the next forefront, the next frontier will be in the space of the brain. So it's psychology and neuroscience. And I would urge upcoming marketers to skill themselves in those areas to study, in fact, to qualify themselves in neuroscience and psychology because I think that will be the next frontier. Thank you, Karthi. I would have loved to take more questions from audiences and even ask some of the questions that we had. But I also feel bad for the entire team and you that you've been on here for a very, very long time. It's almost eight o'clock. So over to you, Bhavna, Karthi. Thank you so much for doing this session for us. Lovely, Nazia. Thank you very much. Thank you. And I understand. So yes, we'll call it a wrap. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Martian. Thank you, Nazia, for joining us. Mr. Martian, incredibly thankful and grateful experience here in your today life. Thank you once again. Thank you, Bhavna. Thank you for having me, guys. Real pleasure. Have a good evening. Thank you.