 Hello all. After such an enraging and energetic keynote by Rob Gilby, we hope we can keep the momentum alive. So the topic that we have today is India Digital Stack for Technology and Creative, Creativity in the New Digital Economy and the focus will be on the uniqueness of this digital stack and the value for Web 3 economy. So quick round of introductions by the panel member. You want to get started? Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Gagan. I work with JM trying to build up in tech called Blinks. I have about 20 years experience across technology and finance. Hi, everyone. This is Prasad. I manage digital business in Kodak life, basically managing to keep up with the change or the pace of change which is happening in the digital world. That's what I usually call it as managing digital business. So that's how it is. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Idhavi and I head the enterprise business at Criteo India. Hi, again, everyone. I'm Abhijit Abhijit Shah. I am accountable for marketing, digital business, customer experience and the direct business for ICICI potential mutual fund in India. Thank you. And this is Rashmi Sethi, the chief strategy officer at Merkle link, which is a Merkle, at Factor link, which is a Merkle India company. Let's get started. So talking about the India digital stack, which includes the open source network, the API is for digital products covering identity payments like UPI, account educator is now available for countries that need that technology. I will leave the question open for anybody in the panel to answer. What do you think has been the most successful story of India's stack adoption and penetration within the country or globally? Who would want to go first? Since I came last, maybe. Go ahead. So I'd say, and you know, Gagan and Prasad are here, and this looks a very heavy fin serve kind of a model. And, you know, I'd say the largest game changer for us as an industry, especially mutual funds, has been the whole digital onboarding that the India stack provides. And, you know, opening a mutual fund account was a tedious process, an onerous documentation requirement. And you go back and forth, get various stamps, signatures, papers, then people would verify that. And then, you know, there would be some kind of cooling off period to give a couple of more steps of verification. So it was a large process. It was difficult. At the same time, there were many friction points and, you know, people in the room definitely can appreciate and understand if they're more friction, more drop-off, and less conversion. But the Aadhar-based EKYC works really wonders, and within a few seconds, you can actually get onboarded. So for us, that's been the real game changer, and I'm sure Gagan and Prasad can add. Yeah, so I completely agree. So from the perspective of any BFSI company, today, if I talk about all of them, what you mentioned about Trashmi, that not just the EKYC solutioning, but UPI payment, the entire ecosystem of payment gateways, we all have been doing digital business from last almost 15 years now. But the ease with which customer can today complete the journey online, that has tremendously got changed with the advent of EKYC, CKYC plus UPI as the payment. In fact, we know talked about it during his presentation of entire digital transformation, how that thing completely changed. I would say everything what currently we are experiencing is helping us build that ecosystem stronger from the customer perspective. Thank you. So Gagan, would you like to add like how you have leveraged this? I think everybody has, but what interesting thing is that if you look at the report summary, not even a single slide had financial services in it. In the top three, we had always had the other industries, but right now in this panel three of us are financial services. I think next year we should have financial services in top three with India Digital Stack as possible. First time we are talking about millions of customers in securities, in mutual funds. It has always been an economy which talks about lakhs. In the last 25 years, you say five lakh customers, one lakh customer. Now the digital stack has made it possible to talk about 10 million, 20 million, 25 million. FMCG for that, that's a back of the hand calculation for FMCG. But financial industry is completely changing now. We can build scale. Building scale in financial services has always been a pain because the ROI doesn't work out without digital. It has been always a cost to service with the tech ecosystem that is possible. All parts of digital stack are critical for us. As Abhijeet said that whole onboarding uses Aadhaar, it uses UPI, it uses all the parts. I think personally I have always found Digilocker to be the most fascinating because when I was growing up with a child, I always thought it should be a centralized ID. When Aadhaar came, I was like, finally something is happening. Obviously shocking that nobody had done it in the world. But Digilocker was unexpected. I never thought Digilocker will come or something like that can even happen. It was beyond imagination. So I think that has changed. Even when it came, I was like, this will not work. But the way it has helped us in the EKYC version two. We build a lot of stuff in, I think, 15, 16, 17, 18 with EKYC one when Aadhaar was there. But when Digilocker came, the way the thing changed, I think has given a second big jump. So if we have to single out something which is special to me is Digilocker. But the way we have used it in my industry, there's a specific thing in the securities and investments, which is not so much, I think, in all the other industries is that if you have to invest, you have to continuously transfer funds to keep transferring funds, right? So the way we use UPI, I think has a huge value add to us. UPI is big for all of us, right? All of us use it. But for us, it's a direct revenue value. Because I think that's true for everybody else. Maybe I don't know the other industries. But in investments, more with UPI coming in the way, the customer is able to transfer funds at the time of at the moment when they want to buy a stock. And earlier, see, the stocks move very fast. You have to buy on the spot sometime and so on. UPI makes it possible. So you are able to engage with customers with UPI much better. And for us, it's direct revenue, right? So in my view, UPI is a thing which we have leveraged a lot, which has given us the ROI and that is what is important in the long term sustainable businesses, right? So that's what I can add. That's exciting. Thank you. Would you want to add something? Yeah, definitely. You know, I think Adha definitely, as everyone said, paved the way for this whole stack. But I think UPI really was an absolute game changer. UPI really helped to change the way digital payments was happening. And on one end, there was the government that was ensuring that more and more people become bank account holders. And on the other end, there are fintech firms who are ensuring that people who do not even have a bank account are able to seamlessly do digital payments. So I think that was a very game changer thing. And also, I think COVID really accelerated it because it took four years since its inception for it to cross, I think, three lakh rows monthly. And then within one year, from 2020 to 2021, it actually more than doubled to seven lakh rows. So I think that also has really changed. And that changes here to stay. Yeah, well, I think what we said about COVID and there was one big WhatsApp floating, what transformed your digital journey or digitization in the organization. And the questions were CMO, CDO, CTO or COVID-19. And mostly people answered COVID-19. Right? Yeah. So you're continuing with this. So yes, pandemic has catalyzed the digital transformation across businesses. Digital has witnessed a positive growth, be it digital advertisement space, adoption of e-commerce, cashless transactions. So traditionally, basically creativity has been about great storytelling and concepts with some incremental innovations. What opportunities would you further explore to tap into the space where we can create magic by leveraging data with creativity and technology? Who would like to go first? Prasad, you would want to take this? So when we talk about this entire digital ecosystem and link it to the advertisement part of it, what has happened over the last maybe seven, eight years, the data technology and the media planning, they have got very well integrated. You can track all the data points through the analytics, complete analytics, not just your own website, but all your advertisement placements, impressions, clicks, to purchase. Everything can be tracked so that data collection, data accumulation, inside generation was a big change. That coupled with the media planning. So many platforms have come in and that has resulted into significant media planning basis, the data as compared to the gut filling. That is the biggest change which has happened from that media planning perspective. Today I can segment customer, go personalize, re-market, re-target, whatever I want to do with the customer base I have created, the first party data. There are so many avenues through which we can connect with the customers. But the biggest change which is yet to happen and we are still working on it that where technology will aid that solutioning is the creative part of it, content creation. We all talked about chat gpt at the start of the conversation. It is not about what chat gpt is doing was not available earlier. That information with chat gpt is currently pulling out is from search engines. That's where the entire repository of information lies. But it is currently making it more conversational. It is making it more the app for the user. It is giving that user experience. So that same user experience, we need to bring in all the creative part of it. Currently when we talk about creativity, that creating a particular concept, a story telling, we all as a marketer start with the brief, correct? There is a need for the customer and to basically ignite that need, what kind of story I should build out of it, correct? So that's how we all start. Tomorrow we will have another gpt, which is not chat gpt, maybe a create gpt, which will help us develop this communication basis, the brief what we are creating. It will be an additional aid to build so much of content. Currently we say that yes, we are in a content economy, so much of content is getting generated every day. People are consuming the content. But today the kind of content which is getting consumed is what is thrown at you. You have not selected that content. I have seen a lot of videos on YouTube where 1 million, 10 million views are there and those videos have nothing into it. It's just like one cat is jumping from one table to another table, has so many views. But people are consuming that content because that content is getting pushed to them. Tomorrow there will be a scenario where with the help of technology data, a specific content can be created by the brands with the help of that, which is real time content, which is contextual. Today I take some time to create a contextual content. But technology will aid those things. I can write a brief to the system, to a machine saying this is the context, this is the brief, I need an urgent creative, help me with that particular part. I think that's where the overall scenario will change and that transformation will happen. I don't remember which slide but I think it was Vino Slides, which talked about that we have infrastructure, we have worked on digital transformation, there was another pillar which was content. Where transformation is yet to happen, we are in that process. But if that happens, that gives so much of power to both market ears and consumers that the overall customer experience can get amplified like nothing like it. So 2023 basically would be a year where you transform this and the entire customer journey. I was just thinking and I was kind of recollecting an experience just about last week, what Prasad mentioned. Getting creative brief written was like the, I wouldn't say 50, but about 70% of the problem. And the time taken was so high that you just keep on having iterations and review, and that was a large part of NACMO's life to review briefs or task the team to get a brief. And last week, this member in my team just came up with a brief within a day. And it was really well written. The kind of briefs that people used to write or this particular person used to write was needed improvement. Let's just keep it at that. But this was really surreal to get this brief out. So I asked how did you manage that? And he said, you know, I just input it saying how to market blue chip funds to whatever the target segment was. And there was a huge brief on that. And he told me that, you know, it's chat GPT. My next question was that, you know, if you are doing this, my competitor is also doing this. So there will be the same brief floating in the market. So to which he added that there's a tool, sir, that kind of checks it for plagiarism. And this is 90% non-plagiarized. So I think, you know, things are moving in a very different direction. Thanks, Abhijit. Would you like to add your perspective? Yeah, sure. I think because we're talking about business opportunities, I think ONDC is one thing that will definitely change and present a lot of business opportunities. Because I think what UPI did to digital payments, it is going to do to the e-commerce space. And the way ONDC is expected to move, and once we have a government's muscle put behind any initiative, we all know the kind of penetration it can have, and also it affects the human psychology where everyone is more okay to accept that and go ahead with it. So I think ONDC is going to be huge. And also with a kind of ambition that ONDC has taken, which is to kind of ensure that the digital penetration that we have today in the next two years, they want to take it to 25%, I think, which is good news for so many verticals. There is going to be change for media and entertainment, for sports, for e-com, and even ones that are affected because of a lot of people who are going to be doing these transactions, which can even be like travel, et cetera. So I think a lot of verticals do that. And I think the second thing that I think is commerce media, which is, again, something that has become the buzzword recently. With commerce media, what we're doing is that there is retailers data, and then at the same time, there is an ai, which together gets powered and ensures that you're giving very personalized experience to users these days because it's all about personalizations. And being able to get that user consent and give them that experience, I think that is also one thing that is definitely going to take over. Yeah. That's interesting. Thank you. Can we open this forum for the audience here if you want to ask any questions to the panel? Is there any? Moving on. So India's goal is to become one trillion USD in digital economy by 2025. And this is built on three pillars of infrastructure business transformation and digital commerce like we are discussing. So how do you envision the futuristic business opportunities for elevated customer experience in addition to revenue growth and competitive advantage? And I will add one more thing. Do you see any limitations in adoption of this? The biggest limitation in financial services is trust. Whatever happens, when things go down, that is where the financial services leadership or strength comes in, right? When an economy goes down or when something goes wrong, right? When some frauds are caught, right? So one of the biggest things in Web 3, which I see as a person in this industry is that it will generate more trust. It will generate more decentralized way of clearing, decentralized way of tokenization. So you will see that they are very, very large financial institution in the country who have not still adopted digital fully but they continue to be large and they will still growing much better than others, primarily because they generate trust. So in my view, the biggest thing that still is lacking in the digital ecosystem in India even today is the value, is the amount of trust. Even today there is too much discussion on cyber fraud is a lot, everybody believes that if it is a paper, the fraud chances are lesser. There are enough research which proves that actually paper fraud chances are higher. Actually online fraud chances are lower. But there is a feel to it. So in my view, Web 3.0 should generate more trust, right? We see a lot of people talk about crypto and I have a not very good, not a very good understanding of crypto but there is a lot of trust issues which causes the delay in growth. So in our industry, I think the biggest thing is about how the new technologies will generate trust. When we talk about ONDC, some of these things, UPI, ERUPI, I think generate more trust. And that is why while there is so much e-commerce in the country in the last seven, eight years in terms of e-tailing, the way flip cars have grown, ONDC will generate more trust, right? So more trust comes, I think that will pave the way. So more technology and stack should generate more deep trust in the consumers about the whole ecosystem. Thank you. You would like to add perspective? Yeah, I think what Gagan mentioned about trust is the opportunity to the opportunity part in your question because I think digitization, digitally, customer experience, involvement, high engagement, it all leads to a lot of transparency in the transaction, be it onboarding, ongoing, or any engagement with the product. Be it ordering on swiggy, where you actually see where the person is, what's happening, and I have a recourse. In a non-digital framework, that experience is largely broken. And when it comes to financial services, the largest grouse that a customer has with any financial institution is that they took my money but I don't know what happened to my money. Or when will I get my redemption? Or I do not have any view on how things are moving. And how is it to close an accounting? Absolutely. I mean, yeah. And so, you know, with this NRI UP, NRI is also wanting to invest in India, the biggest, and if you pick up any NRI, the largest entry barrier was that, look, I really get scared of the whole documentation slash onboarding process. So digitization helps with it. Of course, large corporates, large companies are still a bit careful where to tread on the digital journey, be it on cloud migration or be it on new open architecture-led technologies because of the whole data transparency trust part. But I'm sure that is a large opportunity with things like Web 3.0 or other initiatives we'll get. And I'm sure, you know, from an enterprise point of view, you can add more light on how things are changing, on getting organizations like ours to be more digital and more nimble. Thank you. So, just to add, from the limitation perspective, I'll just add two points here. One is with every ecosystem getting developed, be it, let's assume if i talk about UPI as the ecosystem, it is creating some sort of monopoly or dopoly in our indian market. Whichever technology we currently talk about, when the entire, I would say, Web 1.0, 2.0 happened, the social media when we talk about the search platforms when we talk about, they all got into monopolies or dopolies in some of the scenarios. Now, what adds to that limitation is they basically take care of entire data. When we talk about the platforms that are currently number one, number two in UPI, they have so much of data that they try to control the entire consumer ecosystem, the entire campaigning, the entire reach out program. It gets concentrated. So how i look at it, if i need to remove that limitation, somewhere what even rob talked about, we know talked about, somewhere the decentralization has to happen so that the entire customer data, the power which all players of the platforms should have with them should not get concentrated with a couple of companies. That's one limitation i will talk about. The second limitation in this entire ecosystem is the customer preference. Currently we all are talking from our perspective that how exactly we should take this wave 3.0 forward to our customers to enhance their experience. But many times what we have observed, at least i understand from the security's perspective or from mutual perspective, it is more, it's a financial transaction but more transactional than emotional whereas an industry like life insurance is more emotional than transactional is more long-term in nature than any other financial product, suddenly the customer preferences changes. They believe, the customers believe that okay, yes, i will look at all the information online. I will check everything online. But when i decide to purchase, i will go to my trusted agent, i think he talked about the trust. He will go to that trusted agent, he will go to a trusted relationship manager from a bank and do that transaction. Because if customer preference is not changing and i dwell into the entire technology stack to improve his customer experience, then there is a challenge. I think what we need to also look into is what exactly customer wants. I might go overboard with my technology, with my experience enhancements but if customer really wants a physical contact point, a person, a face to interact with, then i think we need to live with that point as well. Exactly. So it's more about looking at experience as a starting point and you leverage technology to enable it. Anybody would like to add to the perspective? No, nothing. I think prasad has really mentioned that there is no role of an avatar to replace the physical agent. So, yeah, we are talking about this year is the year of unlocking the web three. Web three leverages peer to peer connect and decentralized infrastructure as we all know to deliver use cases solutions across major applications such as finance, decentralized communities, entertainment and infrastructure. So there would be concepts of blockchain, tokenization, NFT, metaverse, we saw so many examples. What is the unique value propositions you have come across or you think that will enable India to lead on this front? Anybody would want to take this? Our industry so far, I have a limited knowledge still. I think metaverse is primarily helping so far in my industry only in learning, education and learning. We can use metaverse significantly to help people understand financial education but actual transactions in money is still money. Obviously there can be a lot of virtual experiences but industry particularly is about real money. So that has to happen in the real world. So that's what my limited knowledge is. Yeah, I think as I said, you know, e-com is something that will definitely have with ondc a huge opportunity. Then also with the 5G penetration, a lot of the media will also grow. Now, if you look at it, there are already so many OTT platforms that are there. And it's also constantly growing. Now we're hearing about the regional ones that are catering to local dialects so as to actually involve the masses. So each of those industries is actually seeing that opportunity and that is going to change and it's primarily based on this Indian stack because a large part of them are driven by or at least increasing Which is by upi or ondc or 5G technology. Thanks. Thanks. I'll just add one thing from the Oral insurance industry perspective that we all talked About the consumer journey that if i as a customer want to do The life insurance purchase journey, i start with my Online application form, i start with KYC, i have Income proof document, i have payments, then i have Medicals, then we have final policy issuance which is Underwriting decision which finally happens. How i look at it That currently this entire chain of insurance is slightly Lendy. It's time consuming, it's lendy because it has a lot Of physical elements into it. How i look at it, this Entire digital stack which currently we have and what We're going to have in future. The entire health portal is Going to come in. Then our regulatory is also Putting a lot of energy in terms of simplifying the processes. What will happen today from policy search to payment, that Entire ecosystem has got created. But from payment to policy issuance Which includes medical, which is the biggest challenging Process what we currently have, i think that can get Solved with the health portal what government is currently Building and if that gets exposed to various companies and can Act as a repository of health information of most of the Customers who have interacted with that ecosystem, i think That will simplify that payment to issuance leg as well and Overall customer experience end to end will become far Smoother and enriching for the customers. It's about creating journeys which are differentiated and Personalized for your consumer segment. That's the key to the Experience. Yeah. I think, yeah, it's covered from our industry perspective. There's immense opportunity on web three because in any Investment decision, there are multiple people involved. It's not like you just go and invest on impulse and The consumers deciding on his or her own. So there are family members or friends, relatives or that Smart uncle who always makes money in the stock market. And the other part is advise is also on the tap. Today you ask anybody what to do on the market. Everybody and anybody will have a view. So i would say the right advice or the trusted advice coming Through the right set of people is a large opportunity Apart from content or awareness on the final side. And that's really the key because you know we all need Somebody or some sounding board and here the sounding Mode is not emotional but very, very rational because it Involves money, returns, irrs, goals, et cetera. So some kind of an interactive advisory calculator which Helps a customer decide to invest. So that's a large opportunity. Of course, a lot of these tools Are available today are fragmented but what web 3.0 can do is seamlessly build them into the discovery Purchase and ongoing engagement journeys of customers with Their investments. Thank you. So actually to summarize the trends that we Are seeing will emerge in future more like customer Convenience through digital transactions, evolution of e-commerce Through d2c, experiential marketing from basically Web 3 and extended reality and we saw a few examples and Decentralized local commerce which is more hyper local. With this we are coming towards the end of this panel Discussion. Thank you members for such an Engaging and insightful discussion. Hope you all enjoyed it. Good day.