“So, you will see us doing insurance and investments … (We have) very big plans,” Pal said on Saturday.
As per Tata Digital’s website, the super app of the Tata Group currently enables users to earn rewards on all credit card spending, as well as get instant access to funds like personal loans and credit lines.
“It also allows them to protect their assets and grow their wealth with custom insurance plans created specifically for them. Users can also send money to friends, family members or any of their contacts directly to their bank accounts, using Tata Pay UPI,” according to the website.
Pal said Tata Neu was looking to hit the sweet spot which would be a combination of three growth drivers: monetisation, frequency and scale.
When it comes to frequency drivers, Pal said there was a need to add more categories to the platform. Electronics and fashion are among categories that help build scale.
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Pal was speaking at an event organised by enterprise solutions provider Blox.ai.
Tata Digital houses the Tata Group’s digital businesses, including the super app.
“Today we have things that a customer needs, product commerce and daily things like food, grocery, electronics, fashion and all of that,” he said. “We will significantly add newer things like, maybe travel or mobility, or content and entertainment to give a different perspective.”
The opportunity that the Indian market presents is massive and the potential for digital transformation is also immense, he said.
“Payments have matured, the infrastructure is there, 4G is there and 5G is coming, there is an aspirational middle class, digital commerce is going to jump 10x from $75 billion to $750 billion,” Pal said. “So, there is a massive opportunity in the Indian economy for digital transformation. The timing could not have been more ripe for Tata Neu to tap that.”
He said the Tata Group had 150 million consumers across all its brands, along with 4,800 physical touch points across the country.
On building the app, Pal said one of the biggest challenges was on how to deal with the sensitive issue of data. He said this came with its own sets of challenges, especially when it involved integrating data from a plethora of companies involved in varied sectors that have different laws governing them. For instance, the information secured by Tata Sky might involve a different set of permissions from an allied group business.
“There are privacy issues, confidentiality issues and data governance issues,” he said. “Different companies have different consent that they have taken from consumers. There were a lot of complications, but the consensus was to harmonise the data. That took us almost 1.5 years to unravel the complexities.”
Sauvik Banerjjee, Tata Digital’s chief technology officer, said the company was focused on recommendations on Tata Neu at the moment, but there was more on the cards. “Deep personalisation is very tough. Netflix achieved it after a decade. So, we will go through that journey, but the germination has commenced with recommendations,” he added.
From grocery to airlines, Banerjjee said, there was a lot of scope for personalisation. “Those are all at an inception stage. What we’ve done so far is take in customer feedback and mine that,” he added.
Tata Neu was
unveiled to the public on April 7.
