Building customer insights with few lines of code

While Generative AI is what everyone is talking about, I thought of sharing how impactful consumer/ market insights we learnt over the last 15+ years were often incorporated into our products with just a few lines of codes.

Here’s to few lines of codes which made a lot of difference:

1. *543*123#

The very 1st product which Eko launched in 2008, enabled small stores to open bank accounts for walk-in customers. Everyone who got themselves a bank account was already a prepaid telephony customer, and knew how to check their prepaid balance with *123#. We introduced *543*123# for them to check their account balance.?

This real-time capability to check account balance with numbers dialing gave the power in the hands of customers who put a lot of trust on Eko to open their bank accounts and help them build a habit of savings.?

The time & motion to check one's account balance in this manner is faster than any account balance check enabled by any of the UPI apps. Calling upon National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) to enable something similar, specially when we are pushing UPI adoption to feature phone users with #UPI123

2.Penny drop

Thanks to the State Bank of India , Domestic Money Transfer service via our neighboring stores started in 2010. This happened much before the launch of IMPS. The API which State Bank of India gave operators like Eko enabled us to check the name of the beneficiary without dropping a penny. This was super powerful.?

Migrants wanting to remit money took assistance from neighboring stores to make the transaction happen. The penny-less penny drop transaction ensured both the shop keeper and the sender that the money was transferred to the right bank account.?

Penny-less penny drop transaction gave birth to the penny drop transaction as we all know today.?

3.IMPS 2.0?

IMPS 2.0 is a name we gave to a feature we built about 8 years back. IMPS was new and unstable, especially with the PSU banks. With payment transactions, I have learnt that instant failures are always better than delayed success and certainly delayed failures.?

With IMPS unstable in its early days, we were struggling with delayed success and delayed failures. We got our product and data team thinking about this problem. Solution was simple: based on historical data & live data patterns we were able to predict when failures may happen and thus started to suggest to our users to use NEFT for transactions and not IMPS.?

With IMPS the promise of the transaction was instant, but a delayed scenario hurt a lot. With NEFT while the promise was not instant, success rates were above 99%.

To give a recommendation to our users to choose the appropriate method of transaction in real-time is very powerful. Eko boasted of 30% better success rates of transactions as compared to others processing similar transactions.

4.Re 1 insurance?

Building on top of IMPS 2.0, while we were attempting to predict when failures may happen, like all predictive features, we were not 100% accurate all the time. For those cases, we started to nudge our users to sign up for a Re 1 insurance at the time of the transaction.?

The logic was simple to have incorporated the Re 1 insurance product. If Eko wasn't able to deliver the experience we promised to our users, we made it good, partially, with a claim amount.?

Today, most of our power users sign up for this Re 1 insurance when they do the transaction.?

Here’s to more such lines of codes which will make an impactful difference to our users and customers in times to come. Finally, grateful to all past and present colleagues who made these impactful insights come alive with a few lines of codes.

#eko #ekospeaks #Microentrepreneur?#FintechRevolution?#FinancialEmpowerment?#DigitalBanking?#BankingMadeEasy?#innovation?#digitalindia?#makeinindia?

#financialinclusion?#npci?#rbi #sbi #neft #IMPS?#UPI?#moneyorder?#postoffice?#digitalmoney?#payments?#bank?

#india ?#people?#inclusion #consumerinsights #marketinsights