Ketharaman Swaminathan

Banks Have Not Lost The UPI Plot

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The common man hears about Google Pay, PhonePe and PayTM while making UPI payments – rather than State Bank of India, HDFC Bank or ICICI Bank. Ergo there’s a widespread belief that banks have lost the UPI plot. Take this tweet for example: The statement on NEFT with stanchart applies to the HDFC as well. … Read more

Six Hacks To Escape Subscription Trap

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In What Is Subscription Trap?, we saw several Dark Patterns used by brands and service providers (“Merchants”) to make it difficult for us to cancel subscriptions like Social network e.g. LinkedIn Premium Digital media e.g. Wall Street Journal Streaming video service / OTT e.g. Netflix Hosting service e.g. Hostgator SAAS software e.g. Salesforce In this … Read more

Why B2B Marketing Should Be Targeted At Company – Not Users

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We saw a spate of B2C marketers trying to get into B2B six to eight years ago. At the time, I’d shared my thoughts on how to harness emotions in B2B sales in my blog post titled Role Of Emotion In B2B Sales. Maybe it’s the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic or whatever but we’re … Read more

On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re Not A Big Dog

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If you glance through LinkedIn, you’ll find a lot of people who claim to be big shots at the Amazons, Googles and Microsofts of the world when they’re not. Neither LinkedIn nor the companies named in these fake profiles seem to give a damn about these impersonators. Even I’m guilty of the nonchalant behavior: There … Read more

Secret Of Solving The Attribution Problem In Sales & Marketing

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Deal attribution is a chronic problem in almost all industries. Its direct fallout is the never-ending fights over credit sharing for deals between sales and marketing in B2B industries. Let me illustrate the attribution problem with the following example: You read an advertisement for a product in the newspaper at home. You forget about the … Read more

Internet Has Changed B2B Buying By 45 Percent

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There are very few topics in B2B sales that are as polarizing as the debate over how much the Internet has changed B2B buying. Some sales people say customers can find their own products and services online, everything has changed, fire B2B sales reps, blah blah blah. Some others say not a single customer has … Read more

Second Order Thinking Doesn’t Make For Good Memes

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A few years ago, I had guided my retainer customers in the digital payments space on how to address imminent threats from identity theft and cyberfraud. More in In #CashlessIndia – Why Putting Cart Before Horse Will Work. Cue to the present day. The media is full of reports on frauds in UPI payments. As … Read more

BNPL Ain’t Killing Banks – It’s Making Them Rich

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Every time a shiny new fintech product or service enters the market, finsurgents immediately predict the death of traditional banks. But traditional banks always go laughing all the way to the – ahem – bank. We saw this when mobile wallets were the rage 8-10 years ago. Finsurgents predicted that they’d kill credit cards. Didn’t … Read more