What Balaji Viswanath teaches about brand purpose

Evenings are pretty much with the kids. So for me, my me time is between a 4 and a 5 a.m. It is not exercise. To start off, Amex is synonymous with a very premium customer base and as a lifestyle enabler, sort of you have great programs. That is one of the reasons many users come to Amex to be part of that sort of that club, right? As you look to increase your base in India, are you also looking to tap into a younger generation who today may not be in that same sort of income bracket that you would target,

but I mean you really log them in for the future? So I think you are right about us having a significant play in the premium space and trying to bring tangible and intangible value to card members on the higher end of the spectrum, but also as if you look at the entire population today, almost more than 50% are in the millennial space. So we will be doing Amex a disservice if you are not operating the space and we will do customer a disservice if you are not able to bring our value to them.

So what we have done in the last 12 to 18 months is we have brought to life products and services, which are focused on millennials. And Amex has a brand today, if you look at new customers who are coming to the franchise, almost about 60 odd percent, more than 60 percent are millennials, who are seeing value in the products and picking up products within the franchise. How are we able to do it? That's about customizing our products and services, which are more focused on everyday spend.

So we have a everyday spend card, which gives you 10x at some cab services, some e-commerce players, offline retail or movies. So that's speaking to someone who says, okay, these are my key purchases that I do and this supports my lifestyle and my daily life. So that's how we bring value to the table. Millennials are clearly driving the cashless economy today. In terms of your brand building, how do you sort of reach out to them? What are the mediums that you would be using? Are there, how do you use storytelling formats, for example?

Do you use video, do you, on a digital platforms? Are you big on social media? What would you really be doing? So at a large level, we pivot our entire performance or the conversion strategy on the brand and the whole brand strategy is based on powerful backing. It's about having a brand like American Express behind you to be able to support you with your lifestyle and with your spending needs. So when it comes to conversion, what we do is we pick up that same brand elements.

That comes out of the powerful backing story and then we convert it to more of acquisition messages. And how we do it is we try and bring the entire acquisition ecosystem to where these millennials are. Millennials are, if you look at it, want things to be made simpler and get to the story straight. Don't beat around the bush in terms of what you want to communicate. And how can I find the shortest journey to doing it? Because the attention span is only so much.

So what we do is we find channels and partners through whom we are able to get to the millennial population and then are able to customize our ecosystem, the acquisition ecosystem to be able to get the person down the funnel at the partner site or a social media and then eventually convert them once they are down the funnel. So that's how we do it. One quick question about, so you know, last few years, one of the biggest things to sort of happen to the economy was demonetization. Right.

And of course, the cashless, the players who work the payment apps, fintech players, credit card companies, of course, had a big boost because of that. How do you think that has paid out? How much of the economy is sort of moving cashless? What has your learnings been out of that? Is it there to stay? And what is really the future there? I think cashless is here to stay. Pre-demonetization and post-demonetization, it's a very different story. That said, the runway for growth is still huge.

If you look at overall GDP, it's about 2.8 trillion dollars of which 60% is private consumption. So that's about, let's say 1.7 trillion of which digital payments still represents only about 170 to 200 billion dollars. The rest is all still cash. So I think cash is everyone's biggest competition, whether it's wallet players, whether it's debit card, whether it's credit cards. And I think that more and more customers are moving, shifting towards digital payments because I think the whole convenience aspect is coming through.

Tell us a bit about your life outside of the workplace. What do you do? What are the things that you sort of energize you when you're back from the weekend on a Monday morning? I think, so I have a 11-year-old son. So spending time biking, swimming, depending on the weather. Everyone's passion which is like Netflix or the Amazons. Typically for me that's a 4 a.m. to a 5 a.m. activity because evenings are pretty much with the kids. So for me, my me time is between a 4 and a 5 a.m. It's not exercise like a lot of people do.

And long weekends are travel with the family. So short trips, we try and combine religion with history. I think that's something that I picked up from my wife. So we try and do a lot of religion based tourism. And temples and with history which is probably more to do with either Shakti stalls or those kind of something that has a strong history and temples that are more than 500 years. That's the average that we have seen so far.