Trust is the experience—secured, localized, and built into systems.
In today’s environment, especially in sectors like public utilities and government-linked services, digital experience is about far more than interface design or technical uptime. It’s about trust. And trust, once lost breached, is difficult to rebuild.
For us, digital experience starts with a very simple but powerful question: Can the user customer rely on us? That reliability is measured in multiple ways—accuracy of information, consistency of service, data protection, and transparency of interaction. When someone uses our platform to apply for a subsidy or track their electricity usage, they aren’t just performing a trans action. They’re putting faith in a system to respond fairly, securely, and without un necessary friction.
Experience is not a surface issue—it’s a systems issue. And trust is the true measure of how well the system is working.
What this means in practice is that we cannot separate experience from governance. Consent, privacy, auditability—these are not legal checkboxes to be handled downstream. They are now central components of user trust. We are designing our systems and flows to incorporate privacy and security by design, so that data handling is visible, explainable, and minimal. In fact, our principle is: don’t collect what you don’t need, and don’t store what you can’t secure.
Another challenge we’ve addressed is scale. We serve millions of users, many of whom are in low-connectivity regions, using basic devices, or interacting in regional languages. This requires deep localization of experience—not just in language, but in design sensibility. For example, a three step journey on a desktop might need to be a single-tap interaction on a mobile device with intermittent signal.
We’ve also invested in context-aware sup port. Instead of showing static FAQs or sending users into long support loops, we aim to anticipate what they might struggle with based on where they are in the journey. That means combining analytics with service logic, and using that insight to trig ger helpful nudges—before the user gets frustrated or drops off.
Security is another layer of the experience that users don’t always see—but definitely feel when it’s absent. We’ve had to build strong, non-intrusive authentication and fraud detection mechanisms that work silently in the background. If the user is being protected, they shouldn’t have to think about it. But they should feel it—in the form of seamless, confident interaction.
What’s helped us in this journey is recognizing that digital experience is not a sur face issue. It’s a systems issue. It touches everything—from backend performance and inter-departmental workflows, to regulatory frameworks and citizen expectations. Our observability tools help us connect the dots: from system anomalies to user impact, from failed API calls to disrupted services. And they do so in real time, with actionable insights.
-Authored by Om Prakash Seth Chief Information Officer, IDBI Bank