We remain committed to our transformation programme and we believe that our continued focus on the GPS strategy will enable us to achieve sustained, consistent performance across business lines, while delivering exceptional customer experience.
Subrat Mohanty
Group Executive – Banking Operations
& Transformation
Dear Shareholders,
In fiscal 2023, we continued our efforts in-line with our GPS (Growth, Profitability and Sustainability) strategy that aims to make the Bank an all-weather franchise, that keeps customers at its core and remains ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. This, we believe will make our Bank resilient and future-ready. Towards this aim, we invested heavily in technology, while leveraging data and enabling our people with the right tools to serve our customers better. Some of our areas of focus include building digital capabilities, improving the technology framework, leveraging advanced analytics, enhancing customer experience, increasing ‘premiumisation’ of the franchise, and working to become a corporate citizen admired by our stakeholders.
I would like to share with you illustrative details on what we are doing across focus areas to translate our strategy into tangible transformation.
Building Digital Capabilities
Our digital strategy is focused on reimagining propositions for our retail and wholesale customers, along with empowering employees to effectively engage with them.
On the retail front, Digital continues to be an important acquisition and servicing engine for the Bank with a share of over 94% in individual financial transactions, 67% of term deposits and 81% credit cards issued through digital/phygital modes. We achieved these outcomes through our initiatives driving digital-first products and hyperpersonalisation. We are also leveraging the tech stacks of agritech and fintech companies to serve the retail customer in Bharat.
On the wholesale front, Project NEO reflects our ambition to build India’s #1 digital corporate Bank. We have made large investments into this project that has begun to show early impact.
On the employee front, we have created ‘Siddhi’, the super app that empowers Axis employees to engage seamlessly with customers. All the capabilities required by employees are being built into Siddhi and progressively rolled out to customerfacing employees across the Bank. So far, Siddhi has led to ~15% additional leads generated per day with >35% higher lead conversions.
Improving the Technology Framework
With respect to enhancing the technology framework, our key priorities have been to achieve faster time to market, to widely adopt Agile/ DevSecOps, and to invest in the right team with the right talent.
In order to improve our speed to market, we launched a wide range of API banking solutions for our retail and corporate customers/partners.
Our API suite now has over 400 APIs out of which 285+ are retail banking APIs.
We are leaders among our peers to take the cloud-first approach and 75+ applications have already been implemented on cloud. The DevSecOps Build Farm for Axis is capable of handling multi-cloud CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) and agile is being embedded into the culture of the Bank.
Lastly, one cannot have a strong technology backbone without appropriate investments in technology talent. In line with this, we have 1,750+ people dedicated to our technology agenda of which 390+ form the inhouse Digital Banking team.
Leveraging Advanced Analytics
We have been leveraging our strong data analytics capabilities across business functions for not only improving cross-sell, customer experience, risk management and collections, but also in fraud detection, operational optimisation, and budgeting.
So far, 150+ use cases have been deployed across credit, fraud and marketing analytics on our cloud decisioning platform. We have built best-in-class personalisation capability (10K+ nudge variants live) and scaled up our customer-centric franchise through 100+ alternate data features. These capabilities have enabled us to achieve 79% of the sourcing in new cards and 100% portfolio exposure increase through a datadriven strategy.
We have also initiated work to scale up universal underwriting using alternate data, data science and technology for ETB (Existing to Bank), NTB (New to Bank) as well as KTB (Known to Bank) segments.
Enhancing Customer Experience
We began the Sparsh journey with the aspiration to be ‘India’s most customerobsessed Bank, ranked #1 on NPS’.
To govern this journey, we set up a ‘Sparsh Board’, with nine senior leaders empowered to make the aspiration a reality. We have also been developing our 91K+ strong staff as ‘delight advocates’ and have been creating a common understanding of customer obsession and a way of life through rituals. As part of this programme, one of the things we introduced for our customers is the Axis Promise, a ‘unique to banking’ express service guarantee.
We are confident that our journey is in the right direction with the last year seeing us get more customers as promoters, resulting in upto 33 points improvement in our Retail NPS.
Increasing ‘Premiumisation’ of the Franchise
Increasing ‘premiumisation’ has been core to our strategy and we have taken a major step in that direction by acquiring Citibank’s Consumer Businesses in India.
The acquisition has strengthened Axis Bank’s market position with a high-quality credit card portfolio of 2.0 million cards in force, addition of aggregate deposits of H413 billion of which 75% is CASA as on March 2023 and access to a large Wealth & Private Banking franchise.
We have also retained a key talent pool of ~3,200 Citi consumer employees trained in global best practices, and an experienced leadership with deep domain expertise. We expect our customers to experience the value of this integration with newer, innovative products and world-class customer practices.
Working to Become a Corporate Citizen Admired by Our Stakeholders
Axis Bank aims to be a corporate citizen that is universally admired and our ESG programme is key to realising this objective. We have made steady progress in establishing an ESG culture at the Bank and aspire to be an ESG leader, both, in India and globally.
To achieve this, we have established leadership-driven ESG governance through building ownership at the business level, ESG oversight at the leadership level and making ESG as part of the Board level agenda. And with these efforts, our ESG performance continues to get recognition. We are among top 10 constituents of MSCI India ESG Leaders Index and S&P BSE 100 ESG Index. We also featured among FTSE4Good Index constituent for the 6th consecutive year in 2022 and the Nifty100 ESG Sector Leaders Index.
As an organisation, we remain committed to consciously managing the environmental footprint of our operations and adopting practices that maximise resource efficiencies and deliver greater customer satisfaction.
We remain committed to our transformation programme, and we believe that our continued focus on the GPS strategy will enable us to achieve sustained, consistent performance across business lines, while delivering exceptional customer experience.
Warm Regards,
Subrat Mohanty
Group Executive – Banking Operations
& Transformation
