Introduction to Decisions

When HDFC Bank first introduced credit cards in India, it was piloted for bank employees. A bank manager was one of the early recipients of them. He would keep it locked in the almirah for a year and take it out once a year for buying gold on Diwali. And every year, two days after Diwali, his phone would ring, asking if it was actually him, who had made the purchase.

Now, what exactly was happening here? All the transactions were logged manually confirmed by an army of experts, who’d look at the transactions and mark if a transaction is genuine or not. And the call centres would ring every transaction on the list that was marked as doubtful and the whole process took about two days.

In case you use a credit card now, you’d have received instant text messages from the service provider if it was actually you who’d made the transaction. Now, you must be wondering how did we move from 2 days to 2 seconds in a mere decade? We will try to answer this question and many more such interesting questions in the following lectures, delivered by experts from the industry.