/AU_Bank)logo%402x.e58c3bb35bddcae6e7e8b2b1ae96849fda2503f1.png "AU Small Finance Bank")
AU Small Finance Bank Delights Customers by Offering Video Banking Services Seven Days a Week
2022
The Reserve Bank of India gave the green light for
onboarding new customers through video calls in 2020, and since then,
most banks have adopted Electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) practices. However, other services such as loan applications and disbursements still require at least one in-person visit to the bank.
AU Small Finance Bank (AU Bank), India’s largest small finance bank (based on assets and liabilities), has been successfully onboarding new customers with video KYC since 2020. More recently, the bank has delivered an industry-first initiative of offering nearly all banking services—except cash disbursements and deposits—over video calls.
Currently, AU Bank serves more than 2.7 million customers and has over 900 banking touchpoints. Through video banking, its customers can do almost anything they could do at a branch—such as transferring money, obtaining a credit card, booking a fixed deposit, or opening a savings account—from the comfort of their home at a timing of their choice.
Reducing Time to Value with WorkApps and a Cloud-Based Solution
In early 2021, AU Bank approached
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner WorkApps to implement an end-to-end video banking platform as part of its AU 0101 mobile app. It evaluated several providers and chose WorkApps for its scalability, high availability, and maturity.
“We found that WorkApps had the most robust platform in terms of the APIs [application programming interfaces] available to integrate into our on-premises applications and to embed new engagements at various customer interaction touchpoints,” explains Ankur Tripathi, chief information officer at AU Small Finance Bank.
Within three months, the bank had implemented WorkApps’ onboarding and account servicing solutions. These solutions use
Amazon Rekognition as an image analysis tool to verify customers’ identities in near real-time against their Aadhaar identification document or passport. The bank also uses
Amazon OpenSearch Service to facilitate document and video retrieval from
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and it relies on
AWS Lambda as a serverless means of running code.
AU Bank launched its business in 2017 using on-premises IT infrastructure but is currently undergoing application modernization as the start of a cloud migration journey. It aims to migrate at least 25 percent of workloads to AWS in the next year. “It would have taken us one or two years to build a similar video banking platform without WorkApps,” Tripathi relates. “AWS provides the necessary scalability and reliability for the WorkApps platform, and our time to market and time to value have accelerated significantly with a cloud-based solution.”
AWS provides the necessary scalability and reliability for the WorkApps platform, and our time to market and time to value have accelerated significantly with a cloud-based solution.”
Ankur Tripathi
Chief Information Officer, AU Small Finance Bank
Extending Service Hours for Enhanced Customer Convenience
AU Bank launched with WorkApps and a dedicated team of over 100 video banking relationship managers in June 2021. Tripathi comments, “The response since launch has been phenomenal, with very positive feedback—especially from busy professionals, digital natives, and people such as elderly customers who don’t get out much to run errands.” AU 0101 customers can reach a video banker seven days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., which is more convenient than standard 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. banking hours on weekdays.
The video platform is also contributing to financial inclusion by connecting the bank with more customers in rural areas; about 20 percent of AU Bank’s new accounts opened through video banking now originate in rural India. AU Bank presently serves customers across 18 domestic states and two union territories.
With the WorkApps solution, however, the bank can further expand to new regions—including underbanked rural and semi-urban geographies—and better penetrate densely populated cities such as Mumbai. “We’ve been able to offer digitally advanced solutions to customers in rural parts of the country so that our digital outlook is complementing our branch presence,” Tripathi says.
Improving Customer Communication with Auditable Interactions
The bank also highlights that video-based transactions are more engaging and thus less prone to fraud for customers who are not digital natives. When performing transactions online, Tripathi explains, many people skim over the standard long list of terms and conditions. They often misunderstand a product or lending terms, for example, and later complain about or face problems upholding the agreement. In video calls, bankers go through the list of terms and conditions and obtain customers’ verbal consent. The customers also have the chance to seek clarification on the spot if they don’t understand what’s required of them.
Furthermore, AU Bank records and analyzes all video-based engagements as an added means of quality control. With customers’ consent, supervisors can monitor calls and continually build new aspects into the customer journey based on the queries that video bankers receive. This level of customer awareness would be difficult to duplicate in the branch environment, where in-person conversations with bank staff are often informal. Transactions may be recorded on paperwork, but that doesn’t capture the full depth and nuance of each customer interaction.
Scaling Rapidly, Lowering Cost of Acquisition by over 50%
With the WorkApps solution in place, AU Bank has rapidly scaled up customer acquisition in the past financial year. More than 100,000 customers have opened savings accounts with AU Bank using video banking services and nearly half of the savings accounts opened each month are now done through video banking.
AU Bank has also reduced its cost of acquisition by more than 50 percent. Its team of over 100 video bankers shares a centrally located office from which they serve customers across the country. If the bank had to open its branches during extended evening hours and on weekends, the overhead would be much higher, with a limited geographic range. By harnessing video technology, AU Bank can connect with potential customers in areas where bankers are not physically present, which has helped the business unlock wider distribution at a significantly lower cost.
Offering a Complete Digital Bank with AU 0101 App
Among the customers acquired through video banking, less than 5 percent tend to visit branches for non-cash transactions. Services such as reactivating a dormant account, changing addresses, or updating a mobile number are accomplished over video calls. Feedback to date has reflected a very positive customer experience during video banking.
Since the launch of AU Bank video banking in June 2021, video banking calls have increased threefold. Additional use cases for video banking, including servicing of accounts for non-resident Indians, are currently being built to complement the range of services now on offer. Furthermore, the bank’s mobile app AU 0101 is rated 4.5 out of 5 on the Google Play Store and rounds out a complete digital experience for AU Bank customers.
Taking Video Banking to New Heights
AU Bank is still in the early stages of its video banking project, but it plans to scale up its team of video relationship managers. “From a technology perspective, we’ve architected a solution and selected a platform that can scale as needed without any bottlenecks,” Tripathi says. The bank also plans to integrate more regional languages into its video product offering and is currently rolling out two new use cases with WorkApps for credit underwriting and field investigation.”
Tripathi concludes, “Working with AWS and WorkApps has extended our reach, broadened our funnel, and increased our customer acquisition rate. We’re able to serve customers who are not digitally native and, in doing so, contribute to a national goal of greater financial inclusion.”
Learn More
To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/products/frontend-web-mobile.
About AU Small Finance Bank
AU Small Finance Bank is India’s largest small finance bank, with 2.7 million customers and more than 900 banking touchpoints. Its mission is to become a tech-centric, world-class digital bank that contributes to financial inclusion across India.
Benefits
- Launches video banking platform in 3 months
- Extends reach in rural areas and better penetrates urban markets
- Opens 20% of new accounts in rural India
- Offers banking services during evening and weekend hours
- Improves quality of customer interactions with audited calls
AWS Services Used
Amazon Rekognition
Amazon Rekognition offers pre-trained and customizable computer vision (CV) capabilities to extract information and insights from your images and videos.
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy for you to perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more.
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.
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