The future of banking is scale made personal 

Article Summary 

• Axis Bank CEO Amitabh Chaudhry argues that scale, trust, and deeper customer relationships will give India’s largest banks an advantage as competition intensifies. 

• Axis is using data and experimentation to personalise customer journeys, with Chaudhry expecting those efforts to materially change banking over the next four quarters. 

• J.P. Morgan’s Christine Tan highlighted Asia’s e-commerce growth as a catalyst for financial innovation, alongside significant investment in AI. 

• The next phase of banking will increasingly connect scale with personalisation, AI, payments, and cross-border financial infrastructure. 

For decades, scale has been one of banking’s most powerful competitive advantages. A large branch network, a deep deposit base, a strong balance sheet, and a trusted brand created a formidable moat around the biggest institutions. 

Technology is beginning to change what that advantage looks like. 

At the Global Fintech Fest session, “Transforming Banking at Scale: Leadership Perspectives on Strategy, Growth & Technology”, industry leaders explored how India’s banks are responding to intensifying competition, changing customer expectations, AI, e-commerce, and the rapid evolution of payments. 

The session was moderated by Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor, CNBC-TV18. 

For Amitabh Chaudhry, Managing Director & CEO, Axis Bank, India’s scale continues to matter enormously. But the opportunity for large banks lies in turning that scale into deeper relationships with individual customers. 

“I have always said that scale is important in India and if you are in the top four of five banks in India, which we are, you get a Lion’s share of that profitability. As competition increases, we can access more parts of the country as one of those players.” 

India’s financial market is large enough to reward institutions that can combine geographic reach with technological capability. But reach alone may no longer be enough. Chaudhry sees trust as another critical differentiator. 

“Banks have to build a relationship of trust, and embed themselves deeply in the psyche of the customer, and in doing so have services deeply embedded at the customer level. I do believe that larger banks will have a greater opportunity.” 

The interesting shift is what happens next. Scale gives a bank access to customers, but technology increasingly determines how intelligently it can serve them. 

Chaudhry described an ongoing effort to understand how customers differ, what they want, and when particular products or offers should reach them. 

“As we are experimenting, we are trying to see how best to approach each customer, how they are different, what kind of offer we need to make, what they would like to see…so the whole thing has to be switched on, and it’s already happening, and in the next four quarters, it will change the way we do our business.” 

That could represent a fundamental change in the traditional banking model. For years, banks largely built products and then distributed them across broad customer segments. Increasingly, data and AI allow those institutions to think about customers as individual journeys, with products, communication, and interventions potentially changing according to behaviour and context. 

The competitive advantage, therefore, may belong to banks that can combine the trust and scale of an established institution with the responsiveness traditionally associated with fintechs. 

Christine Tan, Head of Financial Institutions Group Sales, Asia Pacific, Payments, J.P. Morgan, offered a complementary perspective, pointing to Asia’s rapidly expanding e-commerce ecosystem as an important driver of financial innovation. 

“The growth in terms of e-commerce, and Asia being very prevalent in that space, inspires us to find solutions to some of the existing problems and then innovate to take things forward. The e-commerce space in Asia contains to grow, and innovation from Asia perspective has been very progressive. Finally on AI, we are spending a lot in terms of investments on AI.” 

For Tan, payments are another important part of that transformation, particularly as commerce becomes increasingly borderless. 

“Multiple innovations happening in terms of Real and payments. If you look across the RC region, if you look at it, there was an emergence of wheel and payments, and UPI has been a real role model in terms of the role model, the way the whales are accessible to all people. From a cross-border perspective, that will now be adopted and that’s where we come in, and our work with NPCI on the cross border piece to support them.” 

The convergence of these trends points towards a banking industry that is becoming simultaneously larger and more personalised. 

Big banks retain significant advantages in capital, trust, distribution, regulatory experience, and customer relationships. Fintechs and technology companies, meanwhile, have demonstrated how quickly new interfaces, business models, and customer experiences can be created. 

The response from traditional banks is increasingly to borrow the strengths of both worlds. 

AI can help banks understand customers at greater depth. Digital infrastructure can extend their reach. Payments can become increasingly seamless and cross-border. And data can make the customer relationship more contextual. 

Yet the strategic question remains whether banks can deploy these technologies without weakening the trust that gives them their greatest advantage. 

Chaudhry’s four-quarter timeline is therefore worth watching. The real transformation will not be measured by how many AI tools banks deploy, but by whether customers experience banking as more relevant, seamless, and responsive. 

The future of banking may still belong to the institutions with the greatest scale. 

But increasingly, scale will have to feel personal.