Varun Kejriwal
Partner
Mumbai
Varun Kejriwal is a core member Boston Consulting Group’s Financial Institutions practice. He has worked in financial services across a wide variety of topics including post-merger integration, digital underwriting, agile ways of working, digital strategy, disruptive business models, organization design, distribution strategy, analytics for consumer insights, and large-scale transformation. His clients include public sector banks, private sector banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), wealth managers, and technology clients in India.
Recently, Varun has been focusing on helping banks and financial institutions leverage digital to better serve customers. He is an author of BCG’s annual FIBAC productivity report on the Indian banking industry, produced with FICCI and the Indian Banks’ Association.
Before coming to BCG, Varun was an applications engineer at Oracle and worked at Standard Chartered Bank in their retail bank in India.
In an increasingly digital world, banks have taken various strides on digital transformation. While several banks in India have invested and reaped significant rewards by digitizing transactions, automating back-office operations and reimagining customer journeys, achieving excellence in digital sales still remains elusive.
Today's corporate banks operate in a challenging and turbulent environment. To thrive in this environment, corporate banks need to ride the digital wave and leverage the currency of big data with one of the most powerful tools of modern banking – advanced analytics. Firstly, banks can diversify their portfolio, combat sector volatility and boost their fee income by developing productized solutions for clients across priority sectors. Secondly, banks can achieve operational excellence by digitizing their front-end channels (by developing digital RM tools) and their back-office processes (end-to-end customer journey digitization). Lastly, corporate banks can leverage big data and advanced analytics to transform their topline through a mix of pricing, selling and retention algorithms. By crawling the vast trove of historic customer and transaction data with AI engines and Machine Learning algorithms, banks stand to strengthen the advisory role of the RMs, improve conversions and ultimately augment their fee income.
The past decade has seen the Indian banking industry starting to undergo a transformation like it has never seen before. The rate of change in the industry continues to increase every passing year, with changes in the competitive landscape as well as the customer segments.
The banking industry has not fully captured the power of the data that it has (their hidden treasure), but with the growth of advanced digital and data platforms in India, banks need to embrace a paradigm shift, which will help them turn their fortunes.
