RBL Bank taps Google Cloud to drive digital agenda

India’s RBL Bank will be tapping Google Cloud to power its digital customer experience initiatives in a bid to grow its customer base and scale up its services.

With plans to triple its over four million urban retail asset and liability customers over the next three years, the bank said the move will enable it to leverage Google Cloud as its “technology foundation for a powerful product-agnostic customer acquisition engine that delivers more inclusive access to multiple products such as payments, deposits, insurance, credit card, investments, secured loans and more”.

RBL operates a digital platform called Abacus 2.0 that delivers its product offerings across different channels. It noted that its collaboration with Google will also improve customer data management and analytics, drive effective cross-selling across its customer base and reduce customer acquisition costs.

“This is an important strategic milestone in our digital journey. Advancing our innovation agenda and building an optimised and agile data platform to serve our existing and prospective customers is one of our critical business priorities,” said Surinder Chawla, head branch and business banking at RBL Bank.

Chawla added that RBL will also augment its customer targeting efforts through Google Ads and explore co-innovation opportunities with platforms like Google Pay to drive user engagement and build new digital offerings.

In addition, leveraging Google Cloud’s local infrastructure in India will enable the bank to scale its platform and services and meet local regulatory and compliance requirements.

“Cloud technologies enable banks to offer their customers a fast, secure and intuitive experience. We are thrilled to help RBL Bank advance their digital roadmap and harness the power of the vast solutions Google has to offer to create and deliver valuable new services to their rapidly growing customer base,” said Bikram Bedi, country head of Google Cloud in India.

Google Cloud’s latest win in India comes on the heels of its efforts to grow its footprint in the subcontinent. In February 2021, for example, it partnered Tata Communications to offer managed services in areas such as cloud architecture planning, workload migration and operational support.

According to the 2022 TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT priorities survey, nearly half of more than 300 respondents in India are expected to spend more on cloud services, including cloud applications, storage and computing, in 2022.

Also, 65% of IT leaders in India said their organisations are now cloud-first, which entails adopting cloud services in areas such as edge computing and the internet of things, as well as customer experience and business continuity.

The optimism surrounding cloud spending in India comes amid the pressure for companies to build more resilience in their business. In 2020, India’s spending on public cloud services reached $3.6bn, a figure that is expected to swell to $9.5bn by 2025.