How Airtel Payments Bank is branding “Safe Second Account” as new money habit in India

New Delhi: There is a fierce competition for visibility in India's digital banking and payments space.

Between wallets, payment banks, UPI-led apps, small finance banks and neobanks, the category is in constant launch mode. Everyone is paying for attention, dangling cashback, onboarding celebrities and promising the same three things: safety, trust, and protection.

Airtel Payments Bank is trying to do something slightly different. Instead of pitching itself as “the safest bank”, it is trying to define a new behaviour and name it. The pitch is: make us your “Safe Second Account”.

This is Airtel Payments Bank’s first large-scale brand platform. The campaign was developed with Fundamental and directed by Ram Madhvani of Equinox Films. Media deployment is full-funnel but leans digital.

Watch the campaign film here: 

The core message is not “switch to us.” It is “split your risk”.

Airtel Payments Bank is telling users to keep their main savings in their primary bank account and park only “everyday” money in a separate Airtel Payments Bank account, which they then use for UPI and day-to-day spending. The promise is simple: if you tap the wrong link, fall for the wrong QR, or fat-finger the wrong transfer, you do not lose your real savings.

“This is not something that is brewed overnight,” said Pooja Sablok, Chief Marketing Officer, Airtel Payments Bank. “This has been in the works for almost one and a half years. The inspiration is coming from the fact that we looked at the context of the country today.”

That context, she said, sits on two truths.

The first is access. “There are about 750 to 800 million smartphones in the country and almost a billion internet users. Digital adoption has really amplified. It has become democratised, especially after COVID,” she said.

The second is money flow. “The rising use of digital payments, how UPI has really changed the game for payments, and how data, the internet, smartphones and ease of payment have come together. This whole ecosystem has boomed,” she said.

But adoption has not removed anxiety. If anything, it has created a new kind of financial paranoia.

“Indians are innately very, very cautious, given the modest incomes that we have,” Sablok said. “People really have this innate fear of losing their hard-earned money while they are digitally transacting.”

That fear is what the brand is trying to convert into a platform.

“Our research clearly gave us the insight that a lot of these people have this fear: ‘What if I make one mistake while doing an online transaction, while making this payment?’ And hence there is an underlying, active behaviour from Indians today: they have started seeking a second account,” she said.

The idea the bank is pushing, then, is not “let us replace your bank”, but “you should not expose your main bank”.

“People are moving to a second account to separate their primary savings in the main account and use this second account for digital transactions, keeping some money in this,” Sablok said. “If we are travelling, we keep two or three pockets where we keep money. So, this whole thing of having a second account for doing digital transactions, people are really grabbing on to this.”

The claim Airtel Payments Bank is making now is that this behaviour is already there, just unlabelled. The play is to formalise that instinct, make it feel smart (not fearful), and make Airtel Payments Bank synonymous with it.

“While this is a latent need, it was not acknowledged, and it was a widespread need,” she said. “Hence, we felt this is a space that is worth creating a category out of. Bank users are still looking for a second bank account for this very reason: separating their main account, safeguarding their main monies, and having a second layer of insulation for protecting their money.”

Inside Airtel Payments Bank, that is not being treated like a feature line on a brochure. It is being positioned as the spine of the brand.

“For us, it is more about creating our positioning and what we stand for,” Sablok said. “If you look at our campaign line, we have been very bold in taking that stance to say that we are not here to ask for your money. We are actually talking about giving safety and peace of mind to our users.”

She defined the bank’s core target as “a very, very evolved digital transactor who is looking for safety as they are transacting digitally and who is looking for a place they can trust, where they can put their money with the full belief that the bank is there to give them safety, with, of course, all the features.”

Features, she stressed, “are secondary.” The primary job is “building trust and building a relationship with our users with the whole Safe Second Account proposition.”

This is also Airtel Payments Bank’s most explicit move to court urban, salaried, digitally active users.

Sablok pointed out that the bank is already eight years old and did not start out by chasing that audience. “We started off as a bank for the underserved, offering inclusion,” she said. “A vast majority of our bank account holders are coming from rural tier 3 and tier 4 areas where we are their primary bank accounts. They enter the world of banking with us because they get accessible banking at the doorstep, and because of our high distribution levels, we are available everywhere.”

That has not gone away. But the new push is different.

“It is not like with this campaign we are moving away,” she said. “This is a positioning for our urban audiences because for all this while Payments Bank was seen as someone who is not meant for urban audiences. It is meant for the underbanked. What we are trying to do with this is we are trying to massify and have our positioning felt for even an urban audience, that we are a bank that offers something for everybody.”

In smaller markets, she said, the job is still inclusion and access. “Rural tier 3 and tier 4 go-to-market are very different. It is more on the ground, it is door-to-door, it is about education, and it is about making them aware about banking, about what to do, and about how to do it,” she said.

In urban India, the brief is different: “This is an evolved audience and hence creating space in this audience was the biggest challenge of our positioning and our presence. Why will a bank customer look towards Airtel Payments Bank as an option? So moving from ‘why do I need you?’ to ‘hey, I really need you’ – that is the big delta on the urban side,” she said.

Airtel Payments Bank is also very clear that this is not a “burst and vanish” film. The bank wants to frame Safe Second Account as a money habit, not just a tag line.

“We are building in behaviour, and behaviour building does not happen with one-shot campaign launch or one burst. It is not a burst conversation,” Sablok said. “It is a long-term sustained momentum, and to build that trust, to build that credibility, and get the reach, and more importantly, get the reach of the relevant audiences to whom this insight really relates.”

“So, hence, our execution and our amplification of the campaign are also very sustained. It will keep going on for different channels getting activated at different times. We are looking at it not like a burst, but a sustained long-term positioning that we want to stay with,” she said.

That long-term approach also shapes two other calls: media and creative.

In media, the plan is to be present at the exact moment of transaction.

“This is habit change, and habit change in finance is slow,” Sablok said. “Our job is to build motivation, make it easy, and nudge at the right moment. First, we show people why they need a second account to protect their main savings. Then we remove friction by letting them open that account in under three minutes on the app with no branch visit. Finally, we show up exactly where they spend and pay — quick commerce, OTT, e-commerce, CTV, bill pay — and remind them in that moment to use a Safe Second Account. That is how we plan to build this as a category, not just a message.”

Creatively, the brand has deliberately refused to use a celebrity face.

“In the case of Airtel Payments Bank, it was very clear when we got into our discussions that we do not want this to be gimmicky,” said Pallavi Chakravarti, Co-Founder and CCO, Fundamental, the agency on the campaign. “We do not want this to be shouting for attention, saying you have got a famous face. I have got a more famous face. We do not want it to be yet another one in a slew of celebrity ads where authenticity and credibility may be fun to watch.”

For money anxiety, she argued, a star can actually get in the way.

“When the subject is as real as this, and when something goes wrong, the kind of pressure it puts on somebody—we did not see the point, neither Pooja and team nor us at Fundamental, of even getting into a conversation about whether this should be anything but consumer speak. Should this just not be the voice of people?” she said.

Chakravarti described how the brief took shape. “It was not a one-line brief. It was something we arrived at over a lot of discussion,” she said. “Like Pooja said, there has been a lot of consumer work that we have been party to over the course of time, hearing from people what their feelings are, what their trepidations are, and what their apprehensions are.”

One surprise, she said, was that “vulnerability is not just an elderly problem. You think vulnerable parties are elderly people only, but no. Younger people also feel that these things sometimes do happen.”

That led to two layers in the thinking: what to say and how to say it.

“The what was clear from the beginning. You want to talk about not exposing your big bucks. It is a separator that prevents exposure,” she said. “The harder part was the how. One tiny mistake can cost you. That is the reality. You do not have to entertain to engage. You do not have to be a tamasha because this is not a tamasha.”

In her words, the hardest part is actually restraint. “Because when you have something that simple, it becomes that much tougher to pull it off in a way that everyone enjoys and resonates with,” she said. “When you have an absolute zinger on your hands, you know it. People will go crazy just by looking at it. But when you have something simple, to make people sit up and say, that touched a chord, is more of a challenge.”

Underneath the creative language and the habit-change talk is another message Airtel Payments Bank clearly wants out in the market: we are not a burn-cash-to-buy-trust startup.

“It is not about money. It is about the wise investment of money,” Sablok said. “We as a bank are very, very proud to say that we are a profitable bank, unlike many others, and profitable across the years of our existence. We are very proud about it, and we want to continue and sustain that.”

She described the organisation as one that works on “very basic first principles”, including “a full data-backed marketing engine, where you have an ROI for every buck that we invest and there is a clear impact either on the business metrics or on the brand saliency.”

That positioning is also why she is openly uninterested in performance-chasing for cheap acquisition.

“For the brand and for the organisation, brand building is the core,” Sablok said. “We are a bank, and as a bank it is important to build trust, safety and create peace of mind for our consumers. And that cannot come by running behind performance ads. It is a very not-thought-through way of brand building. It is a very rat race. I do not want to get into that rat race.”

“For me, it is important to get the principles straight, to get the belongingness of the customer, to create a pull. And that for me is non-negotiable,” she said. “The entire organisation believes that having a belief and having an identity of the brand will definitely go a long way. We are here to stay. We are not a brand that is here for a few years. We are here to stay for longer.”

She calls this the bank’s first true brand play. “We have not done any positioning campaign before this,” she said. “This is our very first larger-than-life investment for the bank, to make that first attempt at making our users realise who we are, what we do, and what we stand for. It took us a while, but we wanted to be right. Creating a brand identity and a brand presence is not an easy creation. It requires a long effort and a long time learning. We were new. We are still new. We have learnt a lot of things, changed our business models, and reached where we are. And now we feel we are stable, we are profitable, and we are in a space where we can go and claim this.”

So Airtel Payments Bank is not just saying “we are safe.” It is trying to turn “Safe Second Account” into something consumers start to say out loud.

If that happens, it is no longer just a campaign. It is a category creation.