When a Banking Experience Made Me Think About Product Strategy

When I was working at TCS, my salary account was with HDFC Bank.

Like many salary accounts, the account was associated with the benefits and services available to me at that time.

After I left TCS, the salary account was converted into a regular savings account.

That part made sense to me.

My employment situation had changed, so the account type changed accordingly.

I continued using the account.

Then recently, I noticed an annual card-related charge of around ₹1,000.

That was the moment I started looking into what was happening with my account and what other options were available.

While exploring the available account options, I came across MaxSave.

I learned that it had a different balance requirement and a different set of benefits compared with the regular savings account I was using.

That made me think about my own behaviour as a customer.

I was already maintaining a balance that made this type of account potentially relevant to me.

Yet I had never actively considered upgrading because I didn't know that this option was relevant to my situation.

And that's where the product designer in me started asking questions.

A bank has access to a lot of information about how a customer uses its products.

It can potentially understand things like:

• the type of account a customer has
• how the account is being used
• balance patterns
• existing products
• changes in customer behaviour
• eligibility for other products

So I started wondering:

“If a customer's behaviour already indicates that another product might be relevant, why should the customer always be the one to discover it?”

I'm not saying a bank should automatically change someone's account.

The customer should always make that decision.

But there is a difference between changing something without permission and helping someone discover an option that may be relevant to them.

That distinction is where I see a product opportunity.

Traditional product thinking can sometimes look like:

“How do we sell another product to this customer?”

I think there's another way to approach it:

“What does this customer's behaviour tell us about what might be useful to them?”

That changes the experience.

Instead of showing another generic product promotion, the system could identify a meaningful signal and say, in simple terms:

“Based on how you use your account, this option may be relevant to you.”

Then explain:

• Why am I seeing this?
• What changes if I choose it?
• What are the benefits?
• What are the requirements?

And finally:

“Let the customer decide.”

That's not just an upsell.

It is a contextual product recommendation.

From a product perspective, I would think about the journey as:

Understand → Detect → Recommend → Explain → Let the customer decide

The important part is the middle.

The system doesn't need to wait until the customer searches for a new product.

It can recognize a meaningful change or pattern and surface a relevant possibility at the right moment.

Of course, this needs to be handled carefully.

A recommendation should be:

• relevant
• transparent
• easy to understand
• based on a meaningful customer signal
• optional rather than forced

Because personalization without relevance quickly becomes noise.

After discovering this, I contacted HDFC Bank.

I explained the situation and expressed that I was interested in moving to the MaxSave plan.

I also requested that the ₹1,000 charge be reviewed.

The bank was willing to take up the charge dispute, and I continued the conversation regarding the account upgrade.

So this wasn't just a theoretical product-design observation.

It came from something I personally experienced as a customer.

And that's what made the question more interesting to me.

This experience reminded me of something I often think about in product design:

“Customers don't always know which product, feature or solution they need. Sometimes their behaviour tells us before their words do.”

A customer may never search for a particular product because they don't know it exists.

They may not complain because they don't know there is a better option.

They may simply continue using what they already have.

That's where product teams have an opportunity to look beyond explicit requests.

“What is the customer doing? What has changed? What might now be relevant to them?”

And most importantly:

“Can we make the right option easier to discover without taking the decision away from the customer?”

That's the kind of product thinking I find interesting.

Not just designing the interface.

But looking at the gap between customer behaviour, business opportunity and the experience connecting the two.

I don't know whether this specific opportunity is currently part of HDFC Bank's product strategy, and I'm not presenting this as a definitive assessment of the bank's systems.

It's simply a situation I experienced, followed by a question I couldn't stop thinking about as a product designer:

“If we already have enough signals to know that something might be relevant to a customer, why make the customer discover it alone?”

Sometimes, a product opportunity is sitting right inside an ordinary customer experience.

“You just have to notice it.”