YES Bank’s Datathon invites participants from across the world to join its quest of data-driven innovation and develop models for the appropriate sourcing and usage of data across businesses.
With an increasing focus on retail customers, YES Bank, India’s fourth largest private sector bank is now churning data to understand customer behavior and offer a right mix of products based on a predictability model, a senior official stated.
RajatKanwar Gupta, Business Analytics Head, YES Bank, said that the bank has already diversified into retail segment and now harnessing data analytics to come up with models that help understand customer behavior. Rajat, added, “YES bank started-off largely as a corporate-driven bank but with the version 2.0 coming in, we are very retail-centric. Right now our rank one objective, historically and continues to be, to always have sustainable liability generation. We are trying to focus upon building our CASA (current account savings account).”
As part of the program, which was launched in September 2018, YES Bank reached out to the global developer, coder, and data science community to work on its data stacks using curated, tokenized and anonymized data.
YES Bank’s competitive strategy
With a spotlight on retail sector currently, keeping the corporate character of the bank intact, Rajat said data plays a big part to remain competitive in an environment where even fintech players have started to grab a big share in the financial services space. “We want to compete with other banks or even with fintechs. It is actually going to be very disruptive. So, we have to think like that, we have to think that what our customers would want from us,” he quoted.
Reportedly, the bank has built a warchest of about INR 120-150 crore for its data strategy up to 2022-23 and also plans to hire data scientists and experts who will be part of its TechTONic group of over 100 in-house experts. Working on data analytics will also give the bank to read how the cybersecurity threats emanate and how it can be mitigated, Rajat informed.
Moreover, he added, “As consumers, we are consuming a lot of data and in that process we are generating a lot of data, so it has a snowball effect. We are also looking at data analytics to be playing a big role in security detection, fraud detection and threat prediction. So that itself is a big area for us to figure out and there is a lot of thought and idea going behind the scene.”
YES Bank’s Dathathon
YESDatathon saw the participation of over 6,000 data scientists, engineers and developers in diverse Machine Learning (ML) challenges. The top models/products were based on predictive service delivery to enable the bank to provide proactive service, sales recommendation models, customer transaction relation graph, equivalent to a social network of transactions, fraud detection, and analytics for card customer. Furthermore, the models on customer sentiment analysis to predict customer engagement; tools to provide comprehensive products & services to customers and personal finance management tool without requiring access to customer SMS also remained at the top.
As per the reports, the top 20 models identified by the bank will be taken live within a month and the remaining will be moved to the bank’s product library to be developed and taken live within a period of three months. “This will also be a first of its kind data product library which will be iteratively expanded to 100 plus products within 6 months,” YES Bank informed.
