Consent & Preference Management / Data Governance / Customer Control

Consent at the scale of a nation's bank

A consent and preference management platform for one of India's largest private banks. It gives over 30 million customers a single place to manage their data consent, communication preferences, and the permissions they grant to the bank.

Client: UnifyApps & HDFC
Platform: Web & Mobile
Timeline: Mar 2025 - Feb 2026
My role: Lead Product Designer

Engagement

Turning a legal obligation into a product people can actually use.

I worked directly with HDFC Bank's senior management and product team — from brief through to Final-for-Dev handoff, representing ICD as the design partner for UnifyApps. India's DPDP Act gave the bank a compliance deadline that didn't move. Customers needed to see what the bank holds, control what they agreed to, and withdraw consent at any time. The operations team needed every purpose configured, versioned, and auditable. The platform uses AI to infer preferences, simplify legal disclosures, monitor violations in real time, and enforce every consent decision instantly across all connected systems.

Customer consent portal and operator console

Outcomes

400 million consent records. A bank that moves 98% faster.

Consent at HDFC Bank was collected everywhere and governed nowhere — scattered across legacy systems, reconciled manually, and impossible to act on in real time. Centralising it into a single platform did not just solve a compliance problem. It gave 30 million customers a right they were legally owed but had never been able to exercise, and gave the bank the infrastructure to prove every decision it made about their data.

400M+: Consents captured across loans, credit cards, forex, accounts, and wealth products for 30M+ customers.
$4M: Yearly cost savings — by replacing manual and fragmented consent processes with a unified, automated platform.
98% faster: Time-to-market for new initiatives requiring consent, because the infrastructure was now in place.
40%: Delivery optimisation through precise channel preference management across 3M+ daily communications.
10+ AI apps: Deployed across HDFC's Data Privacy Office, Finance, and Legal for 30M+ customers.

Figures reported by UnifyApps from the HDFC deployment. I designed the surfaces that made them possible.
UnifyApps — Large Financial Institution, India

Reflections

Designing at the intersection of regulation and experience.

This project taught me that compliance and user experience cannot be designed separately. Regulations define what must be included, while design determines whether people can understand and use it. The best solution balances both from the very beginning.

Good records create compliance naturally.

Every consent action was recorded automatically as part of the normal workflow. This created a clear audit trail without adding extra steps, making compliance a natural outcome of the design.

Complex information should be organized, not removed.

The portal needed to present all the information required by law. Instead of reducing content, we structured it in a way that matched how customers think, making it easier to understand and navigate.

Designing both sides creates a better experience.

The customer portal and the operator console worked from the same consent record but served different users. Designing both experiences together helped ensure customers had clear choices while operators could confidently manage and verify consent.