Croatia, Cast in Underdog Role, Has the Look of a Champion

PNB Housing Finance in a span of last 5 years has gone through deep transformation and has done what many in this space would consider a miracle. Innovation and a serious look into talent management, PNB Housing has managed to create India’s fastest growing housing finance company. At the heart of its success is its ‘customer friendly’ tag.

For a company that was set up in 1988, as a public sector holding, the transformation really started with the divestment of 26% equity to New Silk Route. Sanjaya Gupta, MD & CEO, PNB Housing Finance caught up with Manisha Natarajan of CNBC-TV18 and said, “The real transformation started in July 2010, with the implementation of the PPP beginning July 2011 and it became very apparent for the people of the country in Oct 2012.”

The changes became apparent in all aspects of the business thereafter. Transformation of employees, technological changes, revamping physical infrastructure, adopting a new target operating model and new brand positioning to change public perceptions, improved customer reach and augmenting the delivery model were all part of PNB Housing ’s massive revamping campaign.

The biggest and its single most important transformation was with regards its employees. A study of sorts was conducted in November 2011 to understand the true dynamics of its workforce. And the result was not surprising. The employees lacked competency, and their behaviour or attitude was far from being customer-friendly.

As Gupta explains, “Indians by nature are aspirational. Each of those employees wanted better salaries, better office infrastructure, better schools to send their kids to and we capitalised on this factor.” Five years down the line it is difficult to distinguish between the old cadre and the new recruits. The biggest victory was won there. Today PNB Housing Finance has 1000-odd employees, all with the same set of ideologies driving them. Customer centricity is now a way of life for all employees.

The next step in this mammoth drive to gain the fastest growing tag was a complete turn-around in the brand image of the company. Gupta says, this gigantic task was achieved through creating respect for the brand. “Brand was repositioned to the world outside through making it more customer-oriented, where it was more perceivable to the youth,” he explains. The next step in the repositioning came by way of homogenizing the brand’s core look and value across the board, including in the way the different branches looked to its customers. We ensured that every team member create memorable brand experience and deliver the brand promise.

“Then we went aggressive on advertising-on print, TV and digital. On one side we modernised the brand, but simultaneously tied it to the emotive, cultural aspect that drives people to buy a house. We truly made buying a house so friendly and simple that it seemed ghar ki baat,” points out Gupta.

There has been a paradigm shift in the new age delivery model - besides the branch delivery model, we created various physical and digital touch points, including setting up a strong in-house sales team, which enables us to provide door step service to our customers. And there are many such other important measures that were taken including building a user-friendly technology interface that not only came easily for its employees across its branches, but also to its customers.

A culmination of these factors have today made PNB Housing Finance, one of the fastest growing housing finance company and it plans to open 23 new branches in the current fiscal as part of its expansion strategy.

It’s a science that Gupta explains of keeping things simple, yet technology upgraded that’s at the heart of the company’s nimblefooted growth trajectory. This alertness also reflects in its growth strategy for the next 3-5 years, where it plans to drive better efficiencies across its employee structure to ensure that operation costs come down even more significantly.

Gupta says, “If per employee efficiency goes up, then operating costs will come down, and customers will get a better deal from us, efficiency is the backbone of cost management. There is still capacity we can build.”

It is also this very structure of efficiency that Gupta hopes to drive across in its CSR activities as well, to ensure that PNB Housing Finance isn’t just yet another Housing Finance company, while he gears for competition to explode the housing finance market in the coming couple of years.

As he aptly puts it, “Competition always makes one sharper. One of the strongest elements of business which is very important is the treasury function. Cost of funds has to be kept low and so it is for us. If you can control it, then with some alertness and agility you can continue to grow at a much higher pace than the industry average.”