There is no universal answer to any customisation problem statement: Ishan Bose

KreditBee is a fintech platform that facilitates instant personal loans to professionals, where they can avail of loans up to Rs 4 lakh as per their requirement. With a strong focus on online tech-based and data-centric KYC, KreditBee envisions solving the financial inclusion gap in the varied demographic segments of the country. The platform is a Series-D funded entity, backed by Advent International, Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, TPG-NewQuest, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, ICICI Bank and Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

The company serves credit and other personal finance requirements through its in-house RBI-registered NBFC – Krazybee Services (Systemically important NBFC) along with partnerships with over 10 renowned financial institutions. The company currently serves 10 million customers across the country.

In an interaction with Adgully, Ishan Bose, CMO, KreditBee, talks about the fintech company’s marketing strategies, fighting cyber frauds, removing the negative tag attached to loans, fortifying targeted marketing and personalisation capabilities, and more.

How has KreditBee’s marketing strategy evolved over the years and what factors have contributed to its amplification?

KreditBee’s marketing strategy has evolved significantly over the years with respect to the diversification of our portfolio of acquisition channels and inculcation of advanced analytical approach towards our campaigns. Today, a usual user browses through various platforms online for specific purposes. Since our proposition is generic and can be stitched to multiple use cases, it is important for us to reach out to relevant users through the online life cycle of the user, which requires us to partner with different kind of platforms.

The right analytical tools, coupled with the teams to drive these initiatives, allow us to ensure that our approach is a lot more data-driven.

What impact do KreditBee’s campaigns on cyber frauds and loans for festive seasons have, and what is the thought process behind these campaigns?

When it comes to cyber frauds, our thought process has been around implementing robust security measures and educating our users about potential risks. Raising awareness and providing tips on how to stay vigilant are key aspects of our organisational strategy. By doing so, we strive to minimise the risk of cyber frauds and protect our customers from any potential threats.

Regarding loans for the festive season – KhushiyonKaLoan – our approach was centered on providing a seamless and accessible borrowing experience to individuals in need. Loans are often seen in a negative light, and as a brand we wanted to change that narrative and support our customers during these times, when expenses tend to increase. Offering competitive interest rates, flexible repayment options, and a quick and convenient application process is our way of empowering individuals to celebrate and enjoy the festivities without stress.

The impact of these campaigns has been significant. Our focus on cyber fraud prevention has instilled a larger trust among our customers. This has contributed to building a positive reputation and fostering a loyal customer base. Moreover, as industry pioneers, we want to instil these best practices of financial awareness among consumers so that it helps the overall industry by making people more aware of the possible frauds, which should lead to larger awareness and lesser possible malpractices as we move forward.

Our KhushiyonKaLoan campaign gave individuals a different perspective towards loans, looking at them as enablers more than fillers. The slow shift in the mindset is aimed to remove the taboo around loans in general, and allow the youth to look at these as elements that provide them financial empowerment in general, which is key for the progress of the young Indian demographic.

Why is a digital-first approach significant in marketing, especially for brands like KreditBee?

For financial brands like KreditBee, the significance of adopting a digital-first approach in marketing cannot be overstated. The digital landscape has completely transformed the way businesses interact with their customers, making it a preferred channel for communication and engagement. First and foremost, the digital space provides unparalleled reach and accessibility. With the widespread use of smartphones and Internet connectivity, a digital-first approach allows us to connect with a broader audience across different geographic locations. This opens up opportunities to tap into untapped markets and reach potential customers who may not have easy access to physical branches.

Digital marketing also empowers us with targeted marketing and personalisation capabilities. Through the use of data analytics and insights, we gain a deep understanding of our customers’ preferences, behaviour, and needs. This knowledge enables us to create tailored marketing campaigns and deliver personalised messages to our target audience.

Compared to traditional marketing channels, digital marketing strategies are often more cost-effective, allowing us to optimise our marketing budget and allocate resources efficiently. Furthermore, the digital landscape is dynamic and ever-evolving. By embracing a digital-first approach, we position ourselves to adapt quickly to emerging trends and technologies. This agility allows us to stay ahead of the competition, drive innovation in our products and services, and provide our customers with cutting-edge solutions.

What role does new-age technology play in boosting the marketing segment for KreditBee?

Technology today helps KreditBee automate the analysis, reporting and soft-decisioning of all its campaigns, be it for acquisition at the top of the funnel or assistance through the funnel via various engagement channels. This helps save cost by reducing CAC, by allowing the marketing teams to allocate both capital and human resources appropriately and efficiently.

The net outcome of this is to reach out to consumers who are more suited and likely to avail our proposition at the top of the funnel, and optimising the engagement efforts by customising the exact offering, offer, pricing, outreach frequency and channel of communication for specific cohort of users through the funnel. We also have customised product journeys for specific set of users to ensure that we serve different categories of customers differently, and the experience each user gets on our platform is in line with the persona he/she represents.

How do marketers extract data points and utilise them to build customised marketing strategies?

One of the biggest challenges I feel marketers face today isn’t not being able to extract data, but rather not being able to use it efficiently enough. The major impediment for this is to look at different data sets in isolation, analysing them separately and then connecting them as discrete pointers rather than marrying all the data sets together, connecting the dots at source and then analysing the overall picture, which gives a lot more wholesome and holistic analysis. The other challenge, I feel, which mostly lies in control of the marketers is not looking at either the correct data appropriate to the problem statement at hand, or not going deep enough to get to the RCA to be able to solve it efficiently.

Customisation to be effective enough is required at all levels. Just tweaking one part and keeping everything else the same won’t help any entity to cut through the clutter of generalisation. There is no universal answer to any customisation problem statement because of the dynamic nature of the markets and the ever-evolving consumer needs. The best way to keep oneself on track is to use the data holistically, perform constant A/B tests concerning one’s experimentation pipeline, and most importantly, quickly use the learning via a feedback loop into one’s existential efforts. While doing any A/B test, it is very key not to tweak more than one variable at a time to ensure that the reason of difference in outcome can be evidently attributed to the respective variable, look at the trends over time and not jump the gun to evaluate the results quickly, and ensure that the cohort split is uniform with respect to the highly-weighed cohort-defining variable, to ensure consistency across both the splits.

Also, the same tests need to be repeated from time to time to ensure that the learnings don’t get stale, but be at up-to-date with the market trends.