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Aditya Birla Capital will launch its direct-to-consumer (D2C) app next month, and follow that up with the launch of a B2D app for distributors and channel partners and a pre-paid wallet in the next fiscal year, as it intensifies its digital play.
Along with the apps and the payments platform, which will be integrated with it, the financial services company from the Aditya Birla group expects to drive growth across its businesses by offering them a range of products and services seamlessly, while accelerating customer acquisition and cross-selling and up-selling products across its subsidiaries.
In an Analyst Day interaction last week, the company’s management said that the D2C app, called ABCD, is undergoing closed user group trials and it was committed to launching it in March, while the pre-paid instrument (PPI) wallet would be launched in FY25, and merchant acquisitions would start then. It has already applied to the Reserve Bank of India for a PPI licence.
Despite curbs in growth of unsecured loans, the company is confident of doubling the loan book this year. The management told analysts that it would achieve its target by expanding its branch network, increasing the share of its secured products as well as by doubling down on cross-selling. Another driver is the MSME Udyog Plus platform which is seeing good traction, and will be scaled up further.
Digital Play
The D2C app is designed to be an all-in-one platform, selling all its loan products, an array of credit cards, investments across asset classes and insurance products. There are other functionalities too such as financial calculators, checking credit scores, a budget and spending analyser, and financial health assessment tools.
From within the app customers can make a single payment using multiple accounts, using multiple modes to send collection requests as well as making UPI payments with partner countries. Last year the company had signed an MoU with the National Payments Corporation of India to launch a complete digital payments suite and more features are being added to it.
With the B2D app distributors can on-board connectors seamlessly, facilitating cross-selling opportunities.
Udyog Plus, which provides lending and value-added services to MSMEs, has been recently integrated with the UltraTech app and the Aditya Birla Group platform, and a monthly disbursement rate of Rs 50 crore is coming in from the group.
“We believe that the current technology upgrades would lead to a healthy run-up in businesses from FY25 onwards, and the operational efficiencies from Salesforce implementation would further kick in from FY26,” said JM Financial in a note.
The company’s digital first approach is already paying dividends. In the current fiscal year so far 80 per cent of its customers in the asset management business were onboarded digitally, 80 per cent of life insurance renewals were done digitally, while in health insurance, 85 per cent of the business was through auto-underwriting.
In the first nine months of FY24, Aditya Birla Capital reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 2,090 crore on revenue of Rs 23,566 crore. The NBFC and the life insurance units are the largest businesses with it, contributing most to the topline, while the bottomline contributors are the NBFC and the AMC.
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