Following members of the FIAKS community participated in the knowledge sharing E-Panel discussions:

  • Mr Nabunkar Sen, Former SVP & CISO, Axis Bank
  • Mr Ruchit Jangid, Vice President – eBusiness , Thomas Cook India Ltd
  • Mr Rana Sinha Ray, Head Technology, TimesofMoney
  • Mr Manish Khera, Former Founder, MD & CEO, FINO
  • Mr Nagaraj Mylandla, Chairman & Managing Director, FSS
  • Mr Bipin Preet Singh, Founder & CEO MobiKwik
  • Mr Naveen Surya, Chairman Emeritus, Payment Council of India
  • Mr P N Vasudevan, Managing Director & CEO, Equitas Small Finance Bank
  • Mr Ravi Shankar, Co founder & CEO, Active Intelligence Pte Ltd
  • Mr Riaz Maniyar, Founder & CEO at easy2lend.com
  • Mr Shashank Kumar, Co- Founder at Razorpay
  • Mr Sony Joy, CEO Chillr
  • Mr Sandeep Todi, Co-Founder & CMO, Remitr
  • Mr Dhruv Shankar, Head Digital, Standard Chartered Bank
  • Mr Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder One97 & Paytm
  • Mr Amrish Rau, CEO PayU India, Naspers Group
  • Mr Abhishek Arun, Vice President, Paytm
  • Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum

FIAKS Community Question

Paytm is raising concerns about Google Pay violation on user privacy and other players like Wallets, payment banks, universal Banks from the industry not so vocal on these concerns in the media. The FIAKS community raises several questions –

Question 1 – Are  these arguments used by Paytm to restrict entry of these MNC Giants like Google, Facebook, Whatsapp? Or other players from industry are expecting Paytm to take a lead and fight this battle all-alone for them.

Question2 – Why are Chief Digital Officer, Consumer banking heads, Executive Directors, and CEOs of the Private, MNC, and PSU banks not vocal on such issues?

Question 3 – What is the view of the various industry bodies who are supposed to protect the interest of the country and payment players on these issues?

Question 4 – Why leading companies payment space not vocal on these issues? Do they want to avoid controversy?

Question 5 – Is it that media is not covering their views?

 

 

FIAKS Community Discussions 

Why community members were so concerned about Aadhar privacy but reluctant to talk when it comes to GAFA? It was said that this is one of the most controversial and tricky subjects especially when most have accepted and resigned to the fact that GAFA rules. As professionals most would not want to take a position as we have jobs and future jobs to protect. As an Indian would love to see Indian entities funded by whoever to get the benefit. Get GAFA to invest heavily in India to get access and get more of Indians jobs.

Paytm wants to rule in payment or a digital finance space and they consider Google as the biggest competition. Paytm is going ballistic on all MNCs entering payments space! You can live without Aadhaar, not without GAFA. I think industry players are supportive of Aadhaar. It’s the privacy-conscious people, which has issues. Also, anything against any government will gather more steam

Unless defined, what is private and what is not depends on individuals. For example, Google Maps is an immensely popular and helpful application and it needs to store my location history to guide me in the future. I personally don’t consider this as private information. People want to get the benefits of such apps but keep commenting on privacy issues. If one is so concerned, don’t use the apps or go to the setting and turn off the permissions. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

FIAKS Community expert said banks are openly partnering GAFA. We have sold our digital souls to GAFA. So banks are unable to think outside it. The banks & NPCI tie-up with Google/WhatsApp/Facebook means Chief Digital Officers, CISO’s Product Heads have extensively studied privacy issues. And they have cleared GAFA tie-ups. Government/RBI should put a moratorium on product launches by these entities  if the violation of privacy identified at a later date.

Another member said why to limit this argument to GAFA? Why not Alibaba and Tencent? FIAKS agreed that  it should be for everyone. Why no one has raised it so far? Are there any concerns from Alibaba & Tencent too?

Member said what’s the concern with GAFA? Why do we believe it’s detrimental to us as clients? I think the Cambridge Analytica incident was unusual. He said using and not sharing, customer information for personalized marketing is perfectly all right. Your personal data is mined by them but not shared. On each of these platforms under Ad settings, you can switch personalization off. Kindly note a bank (before GAFA) looked at your portfolio to cross-sell to you. This isn’t any different

But what about anyone searching TV on Google and company start showing TV brands to him. When you search properties on Google they start showing HL loan, HL insurance product next time. Isn’t this data sharing with companies?

Please understand what’s not acceptable is them sharing your data with their clients. What illustrations you gave is not data sharing. As a marketing platform, they don’t share this information. This is achieved when businesses invest in a DMP (data management platform). They track your behavior and then use digital media platforms to render personalized ads. The fear largely is that Google already knows so much about you and will share this information across its various platforms. E.g. if it knows your energy service provider is Adani, if you’re googling electricity bill payment deals they’ll be able to show you a Google pay ad. Their plan all along has to be to monetize consumer data. The other example is they will use payment behavior to partner with lenders who then offer loans to Google pay customers.

Then what is privacy concern Paytm raising? To me, Paytm fears that there’s someone who has more data than the consumer than them.

Every digital company thrives on data and mining which is the core essence of future profitability. Take an example – Google, FB, etc. Here, the issue seems to be of a true small fish vs big fish fear. They’re scared they’ll get beaten by Google with much lesser investments on Google’s part.

The questions why is it that banks are not worried? Shouldn’t all industry players be under threat by GAFA?It was said not till they can do everything banks can. For banks, they’re partners who can help you sell your products. Of course, we as a bank ensure that we abide by DND even when we reach out to our customers on these platforms. i.e. if a customer has opted out from marketing communication, we will exclude them from such channels as well.

Register and read the entire discussions 

Please register to unlock the full content!

Related Post