A new era of banking with the HDFC Bank’s Digital Innovation Summit

We are the app generation. Things that would take people minutes are accomplished by us in seconds and this is all thanks to the revolutionary change in technology. But, when it comes to certain sectors, we are quite traditional. Take banking for example. I have always been too scared to try and complete any transaction on an app because I live in the perpetual fear that I would lose my phone and then with it my sanity.

But what if I were to tell you that some of the country’s finest brains were working hard to bring in a dramatic change in the way we bank. Have I piqued your curiosity a little? Let’s get to know the Digital Innovation Summit by HDFC Bank better.

HDFC Bank Ltd hosted its first Digital Innovation Summit and recently announced 5 startup winners who had come up with some brilliant ideas on artificial intelligence, marketing, quality assurance, and payments (both mobile and biometric) domains. It is definitely not surprising that HDFC Bank has spearheaded this change, after all, they have been famous for ushering in new innovations in the banking sector

Take for example the ‘Go Digital’ campaign in 2014, with the ‘Bank aapki mutthi mein’ offering, and in the recent past, it has launched a host of new and very successful digital banking products.

Taking this a step further, this bank decided to host afirst-of-its-kind event in the BFSI space in the country, the HDFC Bank’s Digital Innovation Summit which received more than 100 entries from companies from all over India. 30 companies were shortlisted to make presentation to a jury panel comprising of senior management from digital banking, branch banking, marketing, IT, e-commerce and cards. These 30 companies were from diverse domains: payments, mobile innovation, analytics, cloud and compliance.

So who were these winners and what were their innovations?

Bugclipper: An android, iOS and Web compatible app that created segmentation to provide personalized messages. It believes in hyper localization and focuses on contest rather than content.

Tapits Technology: These guys aim to introduce a cashless, mobileless and cardless transaction using biometrics.

FingPay: A 3 factor payment method that can complete a transaction in 2 seconds on a 2G network.

Senseforth technology: Text communication with customers through artificial intelligence.

Net Vigil Software: They have QR code-based offline mobile payments!

Aren’t these ideas simply amazing? One thing I know for sure that the entire banking sector is going to get revamped once these ideas are implemented and I was absolutely glad to be a part of the Digital Innovation Summit where I got an opportunity to interact with these brilliant minds. I look forward to these wonderful changes ushering in a new era in banking.