Philosophy of Tata Digital and Tata Neu and what have we launched

Mr. Natarajan Chandrasekaran – Chairman, Tata Sons:

Good evening to all of you.  Such a pleasure to meet with all of you on the eve of this press conference on Tata Neu. Hopefully, many of you had a chance to look at the app, maybe some of you had the opportunity to shop as well. I think the purpose of my talk to you today is to explain the philosophy of Tata Digital and Tata Neu and what have we launched and where we are going with the whole Tata Neu app on the ecosystem. As you all know, India has a huge consumer base that is increasing every year.  They are highly aspirational, they want a better life, they want better education for their children, access to better health care, better jobs, a better quality of environment or what have you, and our purpose at Tata Digital is to be a trusted partner for a better life of an Indian consumer.  We believe, today there is no solution, you call it an app, you call it an ecosystem, which fully addresses this holistically, specifically developed for the Indian context, and for the Indian consumer in mind.  We are fortunate to have a brand that has a lot of love and trust.  Over the last several decades at the Tata Group we have created several consumer platforms, from fashion, apparel to groceries, electronics, to hotels, financial services and so on, but all of them operate in a siloed fashion. What we have done with Tata Neu is to bring it all together on one single platform. Many of those brands are a part of the app that you see today, and others will follow. Surely it has brought in a lot of synergy for the group, but more importantly it has massively expanded the value proposition for the Indian consumer.

With the breath of possibilities in product commerce, service commerce, and importantly financial services, we believe we will shape this to be a one-stop place for meeting the demands of the Indian consumer, and it is our dream to see this evolve fully integrated into the life, to achieve the day-to-day living in a better way for every Indian consumer.

So, what is our playbook? The core playbook for Tata Neu and to grow and impact the Indian economy and the Indian consumer is rooted in the idea of Bridgital. I have spoken about Bridgital in the past, but Bridgital fundamentally believes in the huge unique human potential, human resources that's available in this country.  It will play out and manifest itself in many use cases of the Indian consumer by leveraging digital access, offline presence, tech innovation, and the human potential that is available in this country.

Now what is our value proposition? Our value proposition is to simplify the life of Indian consumers. The consumers spend time on so many different platforms to accomplish the day-to-day needs - could be products, could be services, could be financial needs. Our aim and goal are to think through every situation in the daily life of the consumer and bring those use cases in a very seamless way and stitch them together into our super app so that life will be hugely simplified, time could be saved, and anxiety could be removed.

Now where have we started? We have started with one Tata.  What we have launched today is the first version of the app; it is a starting point.

Today we see many of our brands in the app hugely connected together with a value proposition of a globally innovative loyalty program “Neucoins” and “Neu Pass”. Neu Pass not only is a loyalty program across every touch point where you can easily earn and consume effortlessly, but also has an integrated financial credit line, which makes getting instant loans very easy and hence the consumption becomes far more simpler, but the Neu Pass value proposition will continue to get enhanced be it in terms of free delivery in some context, in another context it could be more benefits, it could be upgrades, we have lots of thoughts on how powerful Neu Pass can be given our entire ecosystem that they are today and that will come tomorrow. We are working on a number of categories. We are also working on a number of services and all of this you will see in the coming months and quarters. In addition, we are also working on a number of tech innovations including an AI driven personal assistant for every consumer. All of this will be designed in such a way that the “simplified life” theme continuously gets enhanced, and the value proposition realized.

The other point that I want to really mention is that while the launch we have made, has all the products and services from the Tata's table, Tata Neu is an open architecture. Our aim -- I repeat our aim is to ensure that Tata Neu becomes that super app which simplifies the life and meets the demands of every consumer from a product services and financial needs point of view and for that the offerings may come from the Tata’s table, or it may come from outside. Neu Pass will also go beyond Tata Group at some point.

The other point I want to make is that this is not only an opportunity for us from a business point of view. I think this is a huge opportunity for us to make an impact in a massive scale in the lives of consumer and contribute to India. This whole project has taken us about two years, I often read newspaper headlines saying that after much delayed time scale Tata Neu has been launched; from our point of view there was no delay, we were calibrating it all the way on when to launch it and what to go with and we came out at the right time.

We are really overwhelmed with the response in the last few days be it in terms of the downloads, in terms of the transactions, it is receiving a lot of support, but at the same time, there are a lot of critical inputs coming, a lot of questions coming, we want them coming. It is so important for us because I believe any consumer platform has to be built only with inputs from the consumer that includes you and me and we are looking forward to more such inputs, if you may say so criticism, constructive feedback, whatever it could be that will help us think harder and enable us to build a platform which truly will achieve its objective and I believe in Indian economy it is a very strong economy, we are going to see it is going to 5 trillion and then to 10 trillion. The per capita income is going to double and triple, and all of this is a brilliant opportunity for us to shape Tata Neu to be the go-to-place for every Indian consumer, and we will have more ideas as we go along, but our objective and purpose will remain the same. The ideas that we get will accelerate our journey, will fine tune our offerings, and be more effective towards achieving that objective of simplifying the life of Indian consumer and be a partner of choice, a trusted partner and hugely get integrated into the daily life.