Achal Shah is the Senior Vice President and Head - Marketing and NRI Services at TimesofMoney, a digital payments and remittances service provider. With over 12 years of experience in product management, strategic alliances and digital marketing, Achal currently spearheads all the marketing functions for the company including brand, customer acquisition, corporate communications, usability and navigation etc.

Prior to handling marketing, he has worked across different functions and managed strategic alliances and internal sales strategy at TimesofMoney.

Achal also heads the NRI Services business under the brand Window2India. Having set up this initiative from scratch, Achal is responsible for creating and driving a range of products and services to fulfill the needs of NRI customers.

In an exclusive interaction with India Digital Review, Achal talks about the new offerings that TimesofMoney plans to launch this year and the company’s growth so far.

With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on Internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

According to me, digital branding for most categories is a very critical element that cannot be done away with under the guise that it is not ‘performance-based’. Digital Branding in fact is a pretty effective tool to further enhance the metrics of performance-based advertising.

To give you an illustration, assume you are acquiring a lead for Rs. 100 through your search campaign on a spend of say Rs. 1,00,000. Now, it is a normal trend that within your search campaign, the best performing and often most cost-effective keywords are either the brand name or slight variants of it. This is because the consumer is aware of your brand and looking for it hence, he has a higher propensity to convert. Plus, your brand name probably has the highest quality score on search due to which your cost-per-click is generally significantly lower than what others can get for your brand name, which means a lower cost per lead too. More brand searches percentage-wise mean higher volume of leads at a lower cost.

This is where digital branding comes in. While T.V, print etc. would also in some way influence brand recall and indirectly the searches, there is still a significant gap between viewing (the brand) and action (search), due to it being on two different media. Increasingly, primary research for most brands is done online. Also, the targeting levels and significantly lower costs that digital offers compared to traditional media are a huge advantage in favour of the former. 

How has been the response so far to sending money online? Have digital payments been adopted completely by NRIs?

Over the years, the responses have changed and consistently improved in line with the changes in overall consumer behavior online. Since the time we created the online category in 2001, the adoption has been pretty impressive.  In the markets that we cater to like the U.S, U.K, Australia etc., we had an advantage in the sense that the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) was already exposed to doing a lot of his/her transactions online. Sending money online was a logical extension as it had huge upsides for the consumer from the convenience, price and transparency point of view.

Today, a good chunk of these NRIs have adopted the digital payment option to send money.

Mobile is being seen as the 'next big brand and communication tool' but still very less amounts are being spent on this medium. What’s your take on this?

Generally, there are two broad objectives to a digital campaign. Branding (through display, video etc.) to create awareness and acquisition (through search etc.). Mobile is however, a slightly different medium to reach these two objectives. Having said this, it is a very powerful medium aiding a lot of consumer decision-making.

The current spends maybe comparatively low due to the limited inventory, relatively newer medium, not entirely fitting into branding or acquisition objectives etc. But this will change as the opportunities it offers are limitless. From being able to directly connect a prospect on voice to the power of the reach that it offers vis-à-vis the more evolved online media, it is going to have a big say in any brand’s communication campaign.

Tell us about your mobile specific services.

Our entire website is mobile compatible, which means we have a device-friendly site making it easier for the user to navigate on the go. Apart from this, we also have a hybrid app for both iOS and Android devices.

How important do you think is the social media for your brand in India?

Overall, in my view, social media is a good surround strategy to make your presence felt across the different media that the consumer uses. However, as a performance metric it is both early days and also very specific to the industry you operate in. If you are in a more conventional, money-related business you can’t show the same exuberance that a lifestyle brand can on social media.

More importantly, the name ‘social network’ means that the user needs his/her space and that as a brand you cannot be overly intrusive. Striking the right balance is the key.

Specific to our social strategy, we have presence across all the various outlets and we try to communicate to the user segment rather than hard-sell our service. We will continue to build critical, organic mass and engage with them on a selective basis.

Tell us about your most successful digital media ad campaign so far.

We have been in the digital business since over 13 years and digital media has been our bread, butter and jam! We are one the rare purely online service whose cumulative marketing spends would be skewed towards digital in 90:10 ratio.

As a result, we have had to ensure our digital strategy is spot on. It’s difficult to pinpoint a specific campaign but a lot of our campaigns have been well received over the years. However, there are two obvious benchmarks of our work over the years. One is the response from the consumer. Second is competition. As the torchbearers of this industry, we have seen that on a lot of occasions, our campaign strategy has been replicated by competition, which is an endorsement in itself.

Tell us about some new offerings that we can expect from TimesofMoney in 2014.

Again, as the leaders in the space, the onus is on us to consistently evolve the digital remittance space. And 2014 is going to be no different. We have a line-up of faster, more efficient payment modes in our existing markets.

We also have some new, previously uncharted markets on our radar, where we would be going live within the current year. Mobile will see a lot more action especially in our managed services business.

How has the company grown in terms of number of customers? If you can share numbers.

Global cross-border remittances have been a constantly growing industry over the last decade and a half and so has the power of the Internet. Since we are in the cusp of both these rapidly growing segments, we have grown at 25 per cent CAGR Y.O.Y., in our retail and institutional businesses over the last decade.