How the Use of AI and ML Led 5paisa.com to Become a 100% Digital Platform, With 3X Improvement in Customer Acquisition

How has your experience been as a marketing leader in the financial services space, and what is your observation with respect to the use of technology by marketers in the financial sector, which is known to be a digital pioneer?

I have been associated with the BFSI sector for my entire career span of 11 years, and I agree that I have always seen the financial services sector at the forefront of using technology. Fortunately, I have been part of the teams that were leading these changes and got the opportunity to closely see the shifts: from welcome call to onboarding journeys; from SMS banking to app-based banking; from win-back campaigns to predictive modelling; from one-fits-all to an n=1 approach; from sales team spreadsheets to sales tabs; and now from centralised call centres to a decentralised set-up at every employee's home with better productivity and tighter security.

Of course, a decade back, a handful of organisations used to lead the change on the marketing side, as making the user adopt or accept change used to be a challenge too. When SMS banking was launched, it was difficult to convince people to check balances on mobile and not call customer care. At ICICI Bank, I think in 2014 or 2015, we had personalised the website's homepage with the customer's name, among other things. However, this was a real concern for a set of customers as to how they were identified without logging in. At that time, we had to stop showing names and opt for subtle personalisation.

This has now changed post JAM and the wallet wave. The consumer is more open, or rather expecting, different offerings, relevant communication, and a proactive approach. And I feel that the sector is very much aligned with or rather ahead of these expectations.

5paisa.com is now amongst the top three investment apps in the country. Additionally, your app is currently available in four different languages. How do you manage visitor engagement on the platform with relevant content and products across the customer's journey?

5paisa Capital Ltd is one of the fastest-growing discount brokers in India. Since its inception in 2016, our focus has been to enable a seamless DIY investing experience for customers. We have a look beyond Tier 1 approach, and mobile is the key to scale. Initially, the focus was on building a unified and better investment experience. Today 5paisa is a finance super app with a wide range of products: equity, currency, commodity, mutual funds, digital gold, insurance, and loans. Then, as you said, we recently launched our app in Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi, helping us connect with the customer better, especially beginners in the investment space.

Of course, with a rapidly growing base, there is a need to educate, engage, and cross-sell to ensure ROI on the acquisition costs and to get optimum customer lifetime value. We are utilising the power of ML and AI to personalise the customer experience using real-time behavioural data. We are able to make use of timely, relevant engagement opportunities based on each user's exact needs.

From the time a user installs the app, our campaigns kick off and then keep on modifying based on customer behaviour or life stage. Whether it is the account opening journey or a drop-out during purchase, there are journeys built in to help them continue the course. Touchpoints and behaviour patterns are identified to decide whether the user needs to be engaged with a notification or whether they need hand-holding via a call.

As we all understand, engaging with the customer cannot entirely be the play of AI and ML. To set up campaigns, marketers need to understand the customer and the underlying enablers for the demonstrated behaviour. A team of data scientists helps us see the trends and behaviour patterns to develop our own insights into user behaviour, a UI/UX team helps us redesign a simple screen removing the need to do a campaign in the first place, and a product manager plugs in a solution that reduces a five-step process to two. The communication specialist speaks the customer's language to improve response rates.

The use of martech does not limit itself to engagement only; we are also using it to identify the right moments to take user response, thereby generating continuous feedback for future enhancements.

5paisa.com has an extensive subscriber base of 6 lakh retail investors and high volume traders, and all of that on the online platform. How do you segment your customers, and how are you ensuring personalisation at this scale?

We are a 100% digital platform with no branch or relationship manager network, and this has been truly instrumental in achieving this scale in such a short span of time. More than 90% of customers prefer trading on the app.

For us, personalisation begins at the lead stage itself, where we identify the user's state, and the prospect is mapped to the agent who is likely to speak their language in case of a drop-out.

Using a combination of factors like life stage, product stage, vintage and net worth, the personalisation happens in various forms:

• Offerings: base and premium pricing plans are available for customer segments, and features are bundled keeping in mind the needs of the customers in the respective segment.
• Look and feel: customers with upgraded plans have different colour schemes to give a differentiated and premium experience.
• Communication: propensity and affinity models are in place to suggest the right product at the right stages.
• Offers: the offers for up-sell and cross-sell are extended on the basis of the user's past interaction with the product and the propensity to buy.
• Language: as mentioned earlier, the 5paisa app is now available in four languages, which helps us speak the customer's language during their entire interaction. This information can now be moved out of just the UI/UX experience and extended to the campaign communication, thereby improving the response multi-fold.
• CTAs in campaigns: young and higher vintage customers are likely to stick to self-help channels and prefer no calls. Alternatively, beginners or clients in older age groups prefer call support. These considerations are taken into account while building journeys.

What kind of AI enablement are you leveraging in your overall marketing strategy?

We use ML and AI capabilities across our legs of performance marketing, be it search or display campaigns, or for fraud detection or lead assignments. On the search side, ML resulted in 2.7x growth in leads at 42% lower cost. This, coupled with the investments on the LMS side, led to 3x improvement in acquisitions.

On the customer engagement side, as I mentioned earlier, we have a stack of automated affinity and inaction campaigns set up. So we are able to retain a customer if they drop out from a purchase, or propose to them Product A as we know that other customers like them prefer this same product. A combination of such campaigns has helped us improve client engagement, leading to around 40% contribution to overall cross-sell revenue and an 8% improvement in client retention.

However, we are not limiting the use of AI and ML to just customer acquisition or engagement. Customer service is another aspect that we feel can be a game-changer in the long run.

Understanding the queries. Sentiment analysis is something that most brands have been doing. However, we feel that it is essential to have a real-time understanding of customer queries and complaints, especially from the Play Store and app stores, with an index to indicate severity. Such real-time analysis can help us flag issues in time, understand customers' exact pain points, and quantify them. We are doing a proof of concept in this area to have actionable insights for the product and customer service teams.

Solving the queries. As a discount broker, the focus is to enhance the DIY ecosystem. While self-help channels are available, there can be a lot of queries that do not require human intervention and can be responded to immediately. We have partnered with Haptik and launched a chatbot for our clients, with a vision that users can access support instantly while on our platforms.

What kind of themes have you observed with respect to the change in customer behaviour in this volatile market, and how are you supporting your customers to make the best decisions?

Traditionally, retail investors tend to buy at highs and panic and sell at low levels. However, in the last few months, retail investors have not lost their appetite for buying stocks at lower levels. This behaviour is a combination of many factors, like more awareness and access to information, millennials having a higher risk appetite, and the fact that customers are at home with slightly more time at hand to research the right stocks and opportunities.

When the investor is showing drive and passion for investing, the onus is also on the brokers to provide a favourable ecosystem. At 5paisa there is a range of features available to support customers:

• Online and free account opening: to encourage retail investors, we have ensured that account opening is a 10 minute process and absolutely free.
• Stable systems: the rising customer and trading volumes have created pressure on online broker systems. At 5paisa Capital, we have invested in a scalable backend so that users are not left stranded on high volatility days.
• Economy updates: we understand that users need some insights into the economy, sectors and markets, and we have started covering these in our weekly content doses.
• Stock and mutual fund recommendations: regular recommendations on stocks or mutual funds are generated to help users make investment decisions. We also offer smallcases on our platform, which are basically theme-based stock baskets.
• Research tools: for intermediate and advanced investors, we have in-built research tools that can be used to evaluate short and long term investment ideas.
• Live webinars: we conduct a weekly webinar with experts on a range of topics, from investment climate to sector performance to algo trading to tax filing.