Devender Kumar leads revenue generation, customer engagement, and technology initiatives at Angel One. In this interview, he discusses how the company has adapted to changing market dynamics, leveraged AI for customer-centric solutions, and nurtured talent for a rapidly evolving fintech landscape.
Edited excerpts
In a competitive market, how has Angel One sustained its growth? Can you discuss key strategies that differentiate it from other players?
The first and foremost strategy has been a strong focus on customers, solving their pain points across various life cycle stages in digital financial services. This led to launching a Super App that provides a single space for all financial services, giving us a top positioning in multiple financial domains. We’ve continuously innovated on both product and business fronts with heavy technology investments, which enhances overall customer experiences.
Since our inception in 2001, we’ve been highly analytics and data science driven, allowing us to concentrate on diverse customer needs. By combining these focus areas, we’ve maintained a distinct market positioning and sustained growth, especially in the digital era of the last five years.
What are some specific waysthe company has adapted its services to meet the needs of a diverse client base?
We’ve built numerous personalized product journeys by co-opting various client segments and using data science to map right solutions to different customer bases. Our approach is strongly analytics-driven, enabling us to customize solutions for various cohorts and segments. With over three crore plus customers today, we can customize services based on each client’s specific stage and preferences.
We’ve provided services across multiple platforms - apps, web, tablets - and maintained our largest franchising network. This strategy ensures that every customer can interact with us through their most comfortable channel, effectively addressing the diverse needs of our extensive client base.
Could you break down the approach to revenue generation? How do sales, product development, and customer engagement factor in?
Revenue generation involves three core factors.
First, we focus on generating new clients to increase our revenue pool and customer base.
The second aspect is achieving deeper penetration of our services, which means increasing wallet share by encouraging customers to use more platform services and enhance overall transaction volumes.
The third part involves implementing strong retention programs across our app and various services. This happens through continuous development on product and engagement channels to address different client stages. By bringing these elements together, we create an exceptional experience not just for our customers but for all stakeholders in our ecosystem.
In a rapidly changing regulatory and market landscape, how do you approach flexibility and responsiveness?
New regulations have actually safeguarded and enhanced customer value in our industry, creating a win-win situation. From a data perspective, these changes propel us to take a long-term view of our customers rather than a transactional approach to growth. This enhances long-term value for both consumers and our organization.
We achieve this by investing heavily in technology fronts, which provides us an edge in serving customer needs securely - not just today, but in the coming times. Our approach is about looking beyond immediate transactions and creating sustainable, meaningful customer relationships.
Data plays a significant role in today’s financial services. How does the company balance data-driven decisions with user experience?
Data is the core of the digital industry, and it has been central to Angel from the beginning. We primarily use cohort strategies where we divide and understand clients by creating multiple profiles, and then build solutions accordingly.
The real role of data science is matching services to these customer profiles. Our optimization parameters focus on enhancing customer experience and service uptake, which signify whether customers are happy and actually using our services. By continuously analyzing these two aspects, we customize and match solutions precisely to customer needs.
To what extent are AI-driven insights part of the service model? How does Angel One ensure these remain accurate and user-relevant?
We’ve been extensively using AI to help identify various customer profiles and match appropriate services and product journeys. Generative AI is used for generating images, creating content, and personalizing homepages and product experiences.
Our approach involves analytics that start with simple customer profiles, but as we involve data science and machine learning, we can expand beyond three profiles to ten or more, enabling highly customized user experiences. From a privacy perspective, we use randomized data and follow a mature deployment process.
We never directly plug in AI solutions but go through a careful process where AI competes with human-customized solutions. We always maintain approximately 10 per cent manual operation to check for biases and ensure AI serves customer needs correctly.
What steps are you taking to prepare young professionals for careers in the fintech space?
Preparation happens by constantly pursuing customer needs through various digital methods, which automatically inculcates a culture of creating, trying, and assessing processes. This allows rapid learning about new technologies and solutions.
Additionally, we conduct training sessions with industry experts and organize hackathons to motivate and help in right-skilling. This approach helps professionals understand how to serve customers in the digital world. As a result, we’ve developed a team that is motivated, continuously learning, and upskilling themselves to serve customer needs and build great careers in the emerging era of digital financial services.
Is there any other area or trend you feel deserves attention in this context?
Upskilling to use AI-related tools to enhance performance is becoming a critical pillar. We constantly demonstrate how tools like ChatGPT help in speeding and generating better customer solutions. Anyone learning to use such tools will have a professional edge in the long run. We recommend embracing AI tools similarly to how we adopted mobile phones - as sources of knowledge and information.
These tools provide wisdom-oriented answers. With approximately 25 per cent of coding now happening through AI assistance, professionals must learn to integrate these tools to become powerful professionals. AI will complement human skills, allowing people to focus more on creative and strategic aspects that machines cannot replicate.