Private sector lender RBL Bank is working on a new digital platform that would help scale up customer acquisition over the next few years.
Called Abacus 2.0, it would enable the bank to provide products and services to new as well as existing customers digitally, said Surinder Chawla, Head, Branch Banking, RBL Bank, noting that more customers have switched to digital banking channels since the start of the pandemic.
The bank has about 40 lakh customers in branch banking and credit card as of June 30, 2021 and it expects it to rise to about 1.2 crore to 1.4 crore product-agnostic customers over the next three to four years through Abacus 2.0, according to its investor presentation for the first quarter of the fiscal.
Bank-cum-fintech
The objective would be to offer a combination of services provided by banks and fintechs including frictionless on-boarding and use of behavioural data to provide recommendations across financial and non-financial needs of the customer.
“Every fintech does only one use case. But as a bank, we can do many more use cases. So we are trying to build it as an account and we are adding lot of use cases to it,” he said in an interaction with BusinessLine, adding that it would enable the bank to cross sell more products to its existing customer base.
Technology partner
The lender is also evaluating a technology partner for the product and Chawla said he expects the platform to be fully launched in a few quarters.
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The services offered would include payments, deposits, insurance, credit card, investments, loans and buy now pay later.
Branch expansion
RBL Bank had earlier launched Abacus 1.0 as a platform to increase its customer base in Tier 1 cities without having to disproportionately invest in high upfront fixed costs of branches and people.
Chawla however, said the bank will continue to focus on branch expansion as well and plans to open about 70 more branches this fiscal.
“We will open up 70 plus branches. So we should end the year upwards of 500 branches,” he said, adding that the bank will open a similar number of branches for the next two to three years.