Banks ramp up cross-selling, aim to gain bigger share of customer's wallet

Despite all the chatter, Indian banks' cross-sell ratio - the number of products and services they hawk to a customer - remains low, report Abhijit Lele and Raghu Mohan

What you sell matters; how you do it matters even more. More than 80 per cent of Axis Bank’s retail assets are sourced from existing customers. And yet, last year, the bank made a fresh start with “Aarambh”, to enhance product personalisation and cross-selling.
 

“It’s a first-of-its-kind initiative that provides both existing and potential customers with customised products using in-house proprietary algorithms involving multiple data sources,” explains Praveen Bhatt, executive vice-president and head (retail liabilities and direct banking channel) at Axis Bank.
 

The focus at State Bank of India (SBI), too, is to ensure that the products being sold are