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Report argues BFSI’s next growth advantage will come from connecting demand to decisions and fulfilment, rather than adding more standalone digital and AI capabilities 

India’s BFSI sector has transformed over the past decade. Digital has reshaped how financial businesses reach and serve customers, while data and technology have expanded what organisations can see, decide and do. With AI now accelerating decisions and execution, the question for BFSI is shifting from how much capability it can build to whether those capabilities can translate into stronger customer and commercial outcomes.

Addressing this shift, dentsu India has launched Rewire for Growth, a report on the changing growth agenda for the sector. It examines how organisations can move beyond capability-building and fragmented metrics to align around shared outcomes, and how demand and acquisition can be connected with fulfilment and long-term value. At its core, the report argues that customer and business outcomes should determine where digital, media and AI capabilities are applied, rather than allowing channels, technologies or standalone use cases to define the growth agenda. 

Key Highlights:

• BFSI’s next growth advantage will come from directing digital, media and AI capability towards shared customer and commercial outcomes, rather than adding more standalone capabilities.
• Growth strategy should begin with deciding which demand, customers and outcomes merit investment before selecting channels, technologies or AI use cases.
• Acquisition performance needs to move beyond CAC and response to whether demand converts into fulfilled customers and durable value.
• Functional teams can improve their own metrics while the overall enterprise outcome remains weak when measures, ownership and hand-offs are disconnected.
• AI creates greater value when it is tied to a defined business decision, fulfilment and learning rather than deployed as a collection of disconnected use cases.
• Trust needs to be designed into increasingly automated journeys through permission, explainability, human accountability, escalation and recovery. 

Link to the report: https://www.dentsu.com/in/en/reports/asa___rewire_for_growth_2026 

Commenting on the report, Harsha Razdan, CEO, South Asia, dentsu said, “BFSI has come a long way on digital and data, and AI is now raising the stakes. The institutions that create the most value will be those that decide clearly where they want to grow and organise the enterprise around that choice. Rewire for Growth brings together our perspective on how to do this, from creating demand to fulfilment and long-term customer value. For dentsu, this is an increasingly important leadership conversation for BFSI.” 

Narayan Devanathan, President & Chief Strategy Officer, South Asia, dentsu added, “In BFSI, growth rarely breaks at one point. It breaks in the gaps between teams, between a signal and a fulfilled customer, or between acquisition and long-term value. When each function optimises its own metric, those gaps can remain invisible even while individual scorecards look healthy. The strategic shift is to make the complete outcome visible, measure what happens downstream and create clear ownership across the journey. That is where digital and AI capability begin to translate into stronger growth.”