Summary
Anjani Rathor, Chief Digital Officer at HDFC Bank, frames the shift underway in Indian banking around a simple provocation: no customer wakes up excited to visit a bank, and that discomfort points to where the industry needs to change. Despite progress in account opening driven by financial inclusion programs like Jan Dhan Yojana, a large share of new account holders remain far from being genuinely active users of banking services.
India’s diversity of language, culture, and digital literacy is treated as the real design constraint for banking products. The case is made for interfaces built around visuals and iconography rather than text, and for onboarding that feels as intuitive as setting up a new smartphone, so that both an eighteen-year-old in a metropolitan city and a sixty-year-old in a rural town can transact, save, and borrow without needing help.
A conversational banking scenario illustrates how simple a balance check or short-term micro-loan could become once natural-language interaction, OTP authentication, and automated underwriting are combined, cutting the cost and turnaround time associated with traditional KYC. The comparison to a well-designed shopping mall — where wayfinding is so intuitive that visitors barely notice the design — sets the bar for how invisible good banking experiences should feel.
What would banking look like if a technology company were starting it today, rather than a bank retrofitting itself for the digital age?
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