Kotak MF has been working on moving from multiple stacks to a single stack to reduce the go-to-market time for its websites and mobile applications:
Kotak Mahindra Mutual Fund (Kotak MF), with 89 branches and presence in 84 cities, has approximately 4.38 million investor folios in various schemes, as of 30th September 2022. Kotak Mahindra Asset Management Company, which started operations in December 1998, is the asset manager for Kotak MF.
Onto WhatsApp & AWS
Kotak MF has continued its focus on organic growth in digital and positioned all its infrastructure keeping organic customers in mind. Like every organization, it too is keen on building a digital business, and for the same, it continues to focus on building multiple digital assets and teams. Simultaneously, it has re-engineered its infrastructure keeping scale in mind.
In the current FY, Kotak MF has new targets in mind related to the overall performance of both website and mobile applications. Kinjal Shah, Head, Digital Business & Marketing, Kotak Mutual Fund, informs: “We have migrated our core digital property – website and mobile apps – to AWS infrastructure with a clear focus on leveraging the flexibility and speed the cloud offers. We are working to enable better performance and user experience. We also focus on enhancing out bot capability on WhatsApp and our website and making it a virtual relationship manager in the true sense.”
Cloud Saves Time
Technology is integral to all the discussions of Kotak Mutual Fund and no organization will have a different view on technology. The MF industry still has a long way to go when it comes to penetration. The MF industry’s AUM to GDP and penetration is extremely low as compared to the west and some of the traditional products. The only way to cover the ground is the usage of technology and reach out to maximum people and ensure the experience of all digitally savvy customers keeps going up.
Kinjal shares facet of technology: “We have migrated most of the database to the cloud and selectively moved customer data to the cloud, keeping all security in mind. We have been working on unifying our tech stack and moving from multiple stacks to a single stack, which helps us reduce the go-to-market time for websites and mobile applications.”
Distribution: Business Hub
When it comes to retail investors, a significant part of retail business is still driven by Mutual Fund distributors. Kotak Mutual Fund works with multiple vendors based out of Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. These days, most expenses are opex in nature as most of the cost is pay-per-use on the cloud, which also provides flexibility to upscale or downscale based on usage. Kinjal reveals: “We are shifting our approach from vendor-driven development to an in-house controlled development approach and are adding senior technical resources to our team. We have created a dedicated application called Kotak Business Hub to facilitate distributors. We have ensured that it has all functions, be it transactions, servicing, learning, and marketing needs.”
Analytics & CRM
Analytics is always an excellent enabler for any organization as it helps in getting direction take necessary actions wherever necessary. Besides this, analytics has become a critical vertical as it helps contribute to cross sell, upselling and preventing churn. Kinjal explains: “We have started investing our time and money to build suitable models to help us scale our business. We have moved to Microsoft Dynamics for CRM, and all our sales and customer service team members use the same. It comes with a set of best practices that help us reduce development efforts for out-of-the-box functionality that is already available there.”
Enhancing CX, SM Presence
Kotak Mutual Fund has implemented various analytics software to listen and watch what customers experience (CX) on the website and app. It is also present on all core social media channels such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter as well as Linkedin, and is taking social media very seriously. Kinjal elaborates: “Based on the breakpoints or inconvenience, we align our maintenance and UI/UX teams to enhance our product development. This approach has helped us proactively solve many problems and give a better experience. We are building a solid content team in-house to reach out to potential customers and educate them regularly instead of on a campaign basis.”
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mehul@bankingfrontiers.com.
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