HDFC bank takes on e-commerce giants with discounts on 1000 major brands

Private sector lender HDFC Bank on Monday took the battle on consumption straight to e- commerce majors with a three-month long campaign offering best deals on transactions through its platform.

The bank also listed out targets for merchant acquisitions and said it is aiming for a 5 percentage points reduction in its cost-to-income ratio as a result of the digital push.

The aggressive posturing comes at a time when the massive slump in consumption is being blamed for the overall economic gloom pulling down GDP to a six-year low in the June quarter at a 5 per cent.

The bank announced major discounts tying up with more than 1,000 major brands such as Reliance Digital, Samsung, Apple etc and also featuring offers on all banking products. The discounts will be available on both its debit and credit cards, the bank said.

"You get mega offers on Flipkart and Amazon for three-four days alone. We are launching this campaign for three months," managing director and chief executive Aditya Puri said.

Puri said the bank is going through a major transformation to re-define it altogether and will compete to garner as wide a share of a customer's wallet as possible.

He said the bank will aggregate offers from across merchants and present its users with the best offers on its website. It is targeting to have a complete omnichannel presence which will help a user do banking transactions, loans and shopping across channels like net banking and mobile app by March, he said.

The bank is also adding 1 million merchant touch points this fiscal and aiming for a similar number next fiscal to have up to 5 million merchant touch points by 2021.

This is possible largely through digital solutions like QR codes and smartphone-based apps, he said, adding using this also helps drive down the costs compared to the expensive card swipe machines.

Through a variety of initiatives pivoted around digitisation, the bank is targeting to decrease its cost to income ratio by 5 percentage points to the 35 percent in the next five years, Puri said, adding however, that the bank will continue to hire people and also open branches, which will be smaller in size and will act primarily like a sales and service outlet for customers.