Financial inclusion is a mission that every bank is responsible for helping build. As banks increase their customer base and provide more Indians with access to financial services and banking, maintaining this relationship and reducing the friction involved becomes just as important.
The internet has taken us from an era of long queues and waiting times at banks for basic services like balance checking or money transfers, to an era of convenience where these services, and more, are available at your fingertips – literally.
Here are some ways how the internet has helped banks.
Lower Operational Costs –
Operational costs make up a significant percentage of a bank’s overhead, costs that aren’t necessary. Reducing that overhead saves banks valuable money.
These costs were once largely unavoidable, as customers had no other options, but things have changed now, with technology allowing banks to provide services online.
Time Saved –
Banking can be a time intensive process, especially given that physical branches have limited staff and can only handle a certain number of customers at any given time.
The internet offers banks and customers an efficient way to bypass all the confusion and save themselves both time and money.
Better Reach –
By using the internet, banks can expand their reach – their customer base, and the services they provide.
When signing up for a bank account, or applying for a loan or a credit card becomes as easy as clicking a few buttons online, banking becomes a lot easier. When banking is easier, people bank more, and more people start banking.
Digital Indian Language Report
Challenges Indic Language Users Face
While technology has made it easier for English users to bypass the traditional inconveniences that frustrate the average person availing banking services at their bank, it’s failed to do the same for users of Indic languages. This is because Indic language users are not comfortable in the language these online banking services are available in – English.
Think about that for a second. Ever made a money transfer online? Or requested a new debit card? Or even checked your bank balance? Then you’ll know how easy it is to use a banking app or site to get what you need, a process that hardly takes two minutes. Something we all have the transformative power of technology to thank for.
Now imagine if you couldn’t do any of that online. Imagine you had to go to the bank each time you needed something, no matter how minor, no matter how trivial.
For millions of Indians, that’s an everyday reality, something that technology hasn’t been able to fix.
There are over 250 million Indic language users, and they want these services. According to a Google-KPMG study. the digital payment vertical alone sees a CAGR of 30%, with a projected user base of 175 million people by 2021. 72% of Indian internet users cited limited comfort in accessing online content as a barrier to using digital payments. 58% of them cited limited Indian language content compatibility and enablement as a reason.
Which Languages Should You Focus On?
Going by our own research, which was then published in our Digital Indian Language Report, users of some languages are more engaged with content than others.
Here are some of our findings.
- Users of Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Bengali show the highest engagement with content and platforms like apps. They collectively represent around 75% of all Indian language users who engage with content.
- Among major languages, Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, Odia, and Gujarati show the highest growth over a 6 month period.
Digital Indian Language Report
The Trust Factor & User Experience
Trust, after all, is paramount when it comes to banking. How can you trust something you don’t completely understand when your money is part of the equation?
For Indic language users to take advantage of online banking, they need an end-to-end user experience in their own language. Content creation, text input, clear display, and even search & discovery.
Our LaaS (Language-as-a-Service) platform includes multiple solutions that handle each step of the process, building this end-to-end Indic language user experience. These tools let banks build, create, and maintain an Indic language experience for their online services, giving them a presence in languages that most Indians use and trust more.
English-Indian language translation for content, search in Indic language, and convenient input options, and high quality fonts for display – our LaaS platform’s solutions bring online banking, and banks, one giant step closer to the everyday Indian, letting banks extend their mission of financial inclusion.
