Akshay is about to leave for his office. Picking up his phone, he books a cab opting for payment via his credit card. An hour prior to the lunch time, he picks up his phone again to order lunch via an online food ordering app and pays for his food via a digital wallet. About an hour later, his phone screen flashes with a message from his landlord reminding him to pay the rent for this month. Without wasting time, he opens his banking app and makes an online fund transfer of the rent!

The above situation just goes out to exemplify the life of digitally savvy consumer. With the help of your smartphone, you can practically do everything. Today, it’s really surprising to watch how our regular lives are so connected with digital money. In fact, the top spends for our users are travel, shopping and utilities—all done online.

With the introduction of mobile wallets and banking apps, it has become exceptionally easy for one to make cashless transactions, replacing cash at most places.

A digital start

The payment sector in itself keeps on developing with the ever-changing consumer sentiments and the needs of the businesses. Earlier, there was a need to carry bulky wallets for our expenses but with the movement of people turning their focus to credit and debit cards, it had reduced the burden of carrying cash.

Digitally savvy consumers are now ditching their credit/debit cards when it comes to online purchase, all thanks to wallets and banking apps which allow for a swift checkout experience. Moreover, UPI will bring in an added advantage of securely transferring money from one account to another through mobile and will usher in a new wave of money transfers.

Personalisation

Any transaction made using a digital medium leaves a digital footprint and the data providing opportunities for a smart marketer to personalise and make relevant offerings. We all have experienced the power of Google Now. Now, imagine if there were something similar for your personal finances, letting you know when you exceed your budgets, reminding you of bills to be paid and even planning out your investments as per your goals. All this and more is coming, as we move to the world of artificial intelligence, machine learning, crowd-sourced data, multi lingual support, APIs and conversational UX that will completely revolutionise the way we interact with digital offerings and how we personalise it.

We are already seeing this change happen, and users embrace account aggregation in one place, advisory and analysis on data, customised recommendations, automatically delivered based on his or her data.

We are headed for exciting times where our lives and digital offerings will become so intertwined that digital interactions will be second nature to us.

Rahul Parikh is Head, Aditya Birla Money MyUniverse