New Delhi: You may have come across one of those Piramal Finance videos where Neelesh Misra sits down with real borrowers like the Soni family or small business owners and listens to their unvarnished struggles with formal credit, paperwork barriers, and how the lender eventually stepped in.
These films, part of the Parakh series, feel different from the usual finance advertising. In an exclusive interview with Arvind Iyer, Chief Marketing Officer of Piramal Finance, a sharper picture emerged! A brand deliberately built on real customer stories while consciously rejecting celebrity stardom, heavy TV, and traditional mass reach, even in the Tier 2 and 3 markets where it operates most aggressively.
Is this a principled stand or a calculated necessity for a relatively young NBFC still carving out space post the DHFL integration? Well, Iyer traces it back to the core philosophy. “look at the people beyond their formal paperwork, see the person, not just the paperwork.” The tagline “Hum Kaagaz Se Zyada Neeyat Dekhte Hain” is repeated like a mantra.
“It’s part of the fabric of the company,” he insisted.
The storytelling process is deliberately manual and rigorous. “We go out there in the marketplace. We visit our customers. We’ve got a lot of people who are feeding us a lot of intel,” said Iyer. “Unless and until they have a real customer or a real story to tell, it doesn’t have a place. Somebody in the team should have felt and gone and met. There should be somebody who deeply, intensely understands what their story is, what their tribulations have been and how we managed to solve it.” Full background checks, data-first selection, then careful outreach – this is not lightweight content farming, Iyer revealed.
But what you are unlikely to find, however, is a celebrity ambassador fronting the brand. For Iyer, the decision wasn’t born out of a belief that celebrities don’t work. In fact, he readily acknowledges their role. “I don’t dismiss the idea of celebrities at all,” Iyer said. “What celebrities can do is accelerate visibility very quickly. But they don’t replace credibility.”
Content execution leans heavily in-house. “Pretty much everything that you see is done in-house,” Iyer revealed. The single AOR is Womb Communications. Piramal Finance even built an in-house regional desk. “We’ve hit a million subscribers on YouTube,” Iyer noted. “We are just awaiting our gold button!”
While preaching deep human authenticity, Piramal unleashed over 1,000 hyper-local AI-generated short films during the 2026 cricket season. These tactical pieces name-check specific branches, locations, and languages to drive footfalls. Iyer called the cricket season a “launchpad” for reach. “We wanted to be able to tell our customers where our branches are.” Early Google brand lift results were positive, but the brand admits the campaign is still being evaluated for actual inquiries and conversions. The tension is obvious. Can synthetic, mass-scale AI content coexist with the painstakingly manual “real people, real meetings” philosophy without diluting trust? Iyer framed AI as purely tactical for branch discovery, while the emotional core stays human.
Perhaps the most contrarian call is the minimal use of television. “We don’t advertise too much on TV. We actually do very little,” Iyer confirmed. In a market where TV remains a key awareness builder in smaller cities, this is bold.
“The biggest thing that builds trust for us is actually the branch and the branch personnel. Branch is still that pivotal point of trust.” With roughly 700 branches, heavy TV would create wasteful spillover. Instead, spends flow into always-on digital, hyperlocal activations, regional media, on-ground festival participation (such as Kerala’s Pooram), and interestingly, radio in Tier 2/3 for incremental recall.
The logic, according to Iyer, is operational rather than ideological. “We are present in more than half the pin codes of the country, but we are serviced through only about 700 branches,” he pointed out. “We wouldn’t want our marketing to have a huge spillover.”
The media mix also reflects that philosophy. While many financial brands continue to allocate large budgets to television and sponsorship-led visibility, Piramal Finance has chosen a more distributed approach.
“About half of our spend goes into above-the-line activities,” Iyer said, though he was quick to point out that the company is selective about where those investments go. The remaining budget is spread across digital marketing, regional media, on-ground activations, local outreach programmes, branch-led initiatives and content.
Manual story sourcing is slow and expensive to scale. Iyer was equally guarded when asked about the company’s marketing expenditure. Rather than revealing a specific number, he outlined the philosophy that governs spending decisions. “We’re not ostentatious. We’re very mindful of what we spend. We’re extremely mindful,” he said.
Iyer also revealed that the company has chosen to keep media responsibilities in-house, foregoing the traditional media agency model.
The strategy may have found an audience, but scaling it remains the bigger task. “We know for a fact that when we de-jargonise and humanise finance, it tends to travel deep,” Iyer said. The challenge now is figuring out, as he put it, “How can we do that at scale?”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bestmediainfo.com ’
