Why 750M daily transactions make customer quality critical

For financial marketers, a fat lead sheet can look like success while quietly importing risk. YES BANK’s chief strategy & marketing officer, Nipun Kaushal, argued at afaqs! BankFin 360 that acquisition is only half the job — who you acquire matters just as much as how many.

“You can advertise, you can generate leads, and you can get the horse to the water, but get the right horse, not the donkey,” Kaushal said.

Customer quality is a brand-risk question

Kaushal pointed to fraudulent mule accounts and digital-arrest scams that target senior citizens as a sector-wide threat. In BFSI, a lead that converts into a fraud loss is not growth; it is liability. He argued that financial marketing cannot be judged through advertising, lead generation or customer acquisition alone. Security of transactions and the quality of customers are part of the same promise.

Think of it as adverse selection. If you optimise only for volume, the most eager sign-ups may be the ones a prudent brand should reject. Quality filters may look like friction, but they lower long-term cost and protect reputation.

The more digital payments become daily behaviour, the more a bank’s brand is defined by what it prevents as much as what it sells.

Personalisation, but with permission

AI can move banks beyond conventional customer lifecycle management, Kaushal said. Instead of treating customers as a uniform mass, banks can identify the next best action for each person and use sentiment analysis to tune communication. Transaction data shows actual behaviour, not claimed intent.

But the opportunity comes with a boundary: collect only relevant and permissible data. Banking and healthcare hold some of the most sensitive information about individuals. The goal is not to gather more, but to help consumers protect money, grow wealth and meet obligations.

• Use transaction patterns to find the next best product or message.
• Limit collection to data that is relevant and permissible.
• Keep a human route for customers when automated systems cannot help.

Digital is mainline now

Kaushal traced the shift from credit cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to early digital transactions in 2006, to UPI’s launch in 2016 and today’s tap-to-pay. YES Bank, he said, handles more than half of UPI transactions at the backend, with around 750 million transactions a day.

At that scale, changes that once took years now land in weeks or months. That speed changes the marketer’s job: payment habits shift faster than campaign cycles, and digital creative is no longer a cutdown of a mainline idea. In some cases, it is the mainline idea.

The takeaway for any brand

The principle travels beyond banking. Every subscription, D2C or ecommerce brand has an acquisition-quality problem. Targeting “anyone with a card” can look like growth while importing churn, abuse and fraud. The right customer may convert more slowly, but compounds into trust and lifetime value. Acquisition fills the funnel; quality protects the brand.

Source: Afaqs!