Analytics, AI play big role in growth: Canara Bank CEO

K Satyanarayana Raju, MD & CEO of Canara Bank, says 8% to 11% of the bank’s incremental growth in areas like current and savings accounts, and housing and vehicle loans is coming through data analytics and AI/ML initiatives. This number, he says, can potentially rise to 20-25%.

These technologies, Raju says, are enabling scientific lead generation, which in turn is allowing the bank’s employees to spend more time on converting people into customers. “In the traditional system, we spend 80% of time on lead generation – we interact with individual customers, find out what they require, we ask them for recommendations of friends and relatives who might need our services. And we spend only 20% time on conversion. With data analytics and AI/ML, we can save that 80% of time, because lead generation will happen at the back end. And these tools are giving very accurate data. We give the leads generated to the branches, and then all they have to do is convert,” he says.

The bank has been investing heavily in data analytics for nearly two years now. It has spent a lot of effort in cleaning its legacy data. It recently tied up with Microsoft Azure to build a data lakehouse to store its refined data. This week, it inaugurated a Data and Analytics Centre (DnA) in Bengaluru to carry forward innovations. The plan is to move towards real-time alerts by connecting with organisations like credit information company Cibil. “If our customer is going to any other bank, they have to go to an account aggregator for enquiry. At that point, it will hit the Cibil system, and we can get an alert. Immediately, our people can approach them for their requirements,” Raju says.

The bank is also rapidly digitising in other areas. In September, it brought in Vishal Bhatia, who was CTO at Kotak Cherry, as chief digital officer. It held a hackathon for the first time recently to find solutions in areas like customer experience, default prediction & prevention, fraud prevention & prescription. “We received 250 ideas from teams, and we can potentially involve many of them in building solutions for us. Conducting a hackathon is tough, but once you do, it’s a goldmine for you,” Raju says.
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