Buy a coffee and open a Digibank account in India

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In India, customers of Café Coffee Day, a popular chain, can open a Digibank bank account when they pay for coffee. To do so, they need only their biometric-enabled ID card called Aadhaar, and Digibank’s app.

Each cafe outlet has a thumbprint reader for online authentication of customers. After this is confirmed, the bank’s software interfaces with the café’s cash register, captures the information, and opens the bank account.

DBS Bank launched Digibank, a mobile-only bank in India in April last year.

It now has 1.2 million customers and projects that by 2021, it should have five million. That sounds like a lot for a bank that dominates in Singapore’s small market, but it’s still a drop in India’s vast ocean of 1.3 billion people. Nonetheless, the bank is playing a long game in the country.

“As people order coffee, they can also order up a bank. So we’ve massive scale at lower cost,” said DBS Group CIO David Gledhill. Over 500 outlets of Cafe Coffee Day in major Indian cities were involved in this partnership.

The bank accelerated momentum when it teamed up with the Indian conglomerate Reliance which wanted an ewallet to offer such benefits as cashback and reward points to its 100 million customers. DBS white-labelled its ewallet, rebranding it as a Reliance product. But the ewallet has a feature which makes Digibank the mobile bank of choice should a Reliance customer want to open an account.

The partnership route answered a major challenge for DBS: capturing customers digitally. Amplifying this partnership, it embarked on marketing activities to create greater awareness, including sponsoring a major Indian cricket team, Rising Pune Supergiants.

Coupled with its technology strategy, this experience is a guiding light for DBS as it pursues a similar mobile-only bank being piloted in Indonesia.

David Gledhill, CIO, DBS

Being branchless and paperless, Digibank eliminates the costly and onerous form-filling requirement. Using Digibank’s app alone, customers are empowered to open a new account, make payments, transfer money, and undertake other transactions.

Gledhill said the Digibank allowed it to quickly penetrate the retail banking market quickly at one-fifth the cost of setting up a traditional bank.

With tech shaving operating costs, the bank can afford to be more generous with interest payments. Account holders earn 7 percent interest, one of the highest in the market which likely helped it win customers. It also paved the way for better customer engagement.

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