An Interview with Raju Shrestha, Senior Officer of Marketing and Corporate Communication, Bank of Kathmandu, and YouthSave Product Champion

Raju Shrestha shares learnings and insights from his participation in the YouthSave project.

Please introduce yourself and provide us with some history on your participation and involvement in the YouthSave project.

Hello, I am Raju Shrestha, Senior Officer at the Marketing and Corporate Communication Unit of Bank of Kathmandu. I am also the product champion for the YouthSave project at BoK. I have been involved with YouthSave from day one. From writing the Expression of Interest which won the project for the bank to seeing through its roll-out implementation; I have been a lead representing the bank in the project YouthSave.

From your perspective, have there been unique professional opportunities that this project has afforded you that you may not have been able to otherwise access? If so, can you talk about these and the value that these have had for your professional development.

From understanding the kind of effort it takes to identify the needs of a new client segment, in this case youth, to designing and redesigning implementation strategies, the project has been a good learning experience for me. The interactions that I had the opportunity to have with various stakeholders who had rich and diverse experiences in this field has been very valuable. I received technical support and feedback at various stages of the project/product roll-out. Additionally, I received financial support for marketing expenses. All of this played a role in helping me take the product/project to where it stands today.

I think the best professional experience that I gathered from this project has been the various marketing approaches with which I have been able to experiment. The idea of offering a ‘piggy bank’ to youth who opened accounts and build our messages about the product around this item fit nicely with our intention of helping inculcate savings habits in youth; the piggy bank has become synonymous with the product’s name. Financial education campaigns served as a great medium to let customers know that we’re offering something of value, something that isn’t just a “vanilla” product. This is now a ‘go to’ strategy whenever there’s a need to reach out to underserved, newer market segments.

We also used a cash incentive scheme aimed at those who had opened accounts but weren’t transacting; this produced some great results. I feel confident that we can use this strategyto activate many other accounts lying dormant in many of our other products. Incentives targeted at staff also produced quite a big impact on account opening pace; highlighting the importance of getting staff on-board especially if the product/process is new to them.

This project has focused on providing financial inclusion opportunities for youth, a group that has historically been disproportionally excluded from formal banking in Nepal. What learnings are you taking from this project that may influence the way you approach banking previously excluded communities?

Having a customer orientation while in the product design phase, while designing promotional strategies or while construing delivery channels, can be remarkably successful. These processes need to be molded to the needs and preferences of the customer. It’s easy to say “we’ll adapt to the market and change or design to its fit the market” but making sure this happens day in day out is something completely different. Also, it’s rather easy to begin things on the right note and then fall back to the way you used to do things. Getting into a new market is difficult already but sticking around and carving a place for your product permanently within that new market takes much more effort.

Conducting financial education sessions at colleges/schools was something rather novel for us and very labor intensive but it worked out well and helped us in many ways. Getting buy-in from the society on what we’re doing, commitment from the branches on being socially responsive and making sure staff understood the benefit of this responsiveness, being noticed by competition and regulators who followed (albeit to limited extent) our approach, already speaks volume about its worth and why it’s going to be continued and may even extend to other areas.

What preconceived notions about youth, savings and money, particularly low-income, out-of-school youth and girls has this project challenged for you and how do you think the insight you have gained through the project will affect the way you think about these groups from the perspective of a banker after this project ends?

In a number of areas, especially for me as a banker with very little exposure to certain segments of the population, I learned a lot. I learned that often what we think a customer might want can be dramatically different from what they actually want. So, the notion of learn, un-learn and re-learn needs to be practiced regularly. Also, I learned that low-income youth can understand banking concepts quite well – better, in fact, than a lot of “affluent” market segments. Unexpectedly, they find it fair to pay certain fees provided the fee structure is explained and is transparent; this was kind of a surprising finding for me.

We were always clear about the fact that reaching out to out-of-school youth would be a challenge because they are mobile, especially the older youth. But problems such as their lack of citizenship proof because they don’t have parents and the inability of NGOs/Guardians with whom they lived to do much for these youth once they reached the age of majority was quite a unique and troubling finding.

Considering the structure of our society, culture, and its impact on shaping the behavior of girls, is evident. Even though we reached out to more female students, the number of female account holders has tended to be lower compared to their male counterparts throughout the project. We did improve the percentage over a period of time mainly by emphasizing girls’ participation in events, showcasing girls’ perspectives on saving and its benefits in our advertising materials, but this issue is a continuous challenge to this day. As a society which still has practices that can be termed gender biased especially in rural/sub-urban areas, often restricting girls’ participation in a number of areas including owning assets,maybe there needs to be some change in such practices. I am sure this change is taking place but it might be a bit slow.