Jairam Sridharan, Managing Director, and Arvind Iyer, Chief Marketing Officer at Piramal Capital and Housing Finance, addressed the diverse financing needs of the under-served and un-served people of the ‘Bharat Market’ in an interview with Storyboard18 Media Dialogues.
According to Sridharan, India is predominantly a self-employed market. “80 percent of India is self-employed. And, only the rest of the workforce in India is salaried, which means that all the services are being directed at that 20% and all the rest is getting ignored. That is the market, we at Piramal have been attempting to serve,” he said.
Piramal Capital and Housing Finance focuses on suburban and small-town self-employed families with moderate income. They call them ‘Budget customers of Bharat’.
“What we mean by that is, geographically, these are customers who live in the outskirts of big cities or tier-II or tier-III towns. They are not holding formal white-collar jobs,” said Sridharan.
Sridharan believes this segment is highly underserved in the market.
Only above 30 percent of all bank branches are in rural areas where over 60% of India’s population lives. This one data point shows the major gap in access to formal sources of credit and dependence on informal money lenders in the country’s rural markets and even in tier-II and tier-III markets.
Piramal Capital and Housing Finance is attempting to bridge this divide through its products, media strategies and marketing initiatives that break conventional perceptions about credit access. It focuses on suburban and small-town self-employed families with moderate income.
According to Iyer, the company has to inform the customers what the brand proposition is. “A brand promise or a brand proposition is a bolder thing to do in many ways because it forces you to calibrate your own organisation, you are able to figure out how do we treat this customer and give them what they want in a manner that we are able to provide it to them. That has been the bedrock with which we have laid the foundation of saying how we should be doing business with the ‘Budget customers of Bharat’”.
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