A new privacy law gave 30M+ banking customers the right to control their data, and gave the bank months to make that real. This is the story of one platform built for two people who could not be more different: the customer deciding, and the operator who has to prove it happened.
India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act rewrote how organizations collect and use personal data. For HDFC Bank, with 30M+ customers across loans, credit cards, forex, savings, and wealth, compliance was not a feature to schedule. It was an obligation with a date attached.
The brief had two halves that pulled in opposite directions. Customers needed to see what data the bank holds, control what they had agreed to, and withdraw consent at any time. The bank needed to configure every consent purpose, version the legal text behind it, and keep an auditable record of all of it.
A customer sees an outcome: a clear choice about how their bank can reach them. An operator sees the source: the purpose, the legal statement behind it, and the trail it leaves. Both are looking at the same consent record from opposite ends. Designing one side well was impossible without understanding the other.
Consent at a bank is not a checkbox. It is a chain, and I had to understand the whole thing before either side could be coherent.
Understanding this chain end to end is what let me design both surfaces without leaking the complexity of the middle. The customer sees the outcome. The operator configures the source. Neither should have to think about the four steps in between.
One screen has to carry a lot: the personal data on record, five categories of consent across different products, channel preferences (In-App, Email, Call, WhatsApp, SMS), consent given to external platforms (DigiLocker, CKYC, E-KYC, Perfios, Anumati, Bureau Connect), the digital channels the data flows through, and the customer's rights under the new law.
All of it is legally required to be present. Shown flat, at equal weight, it stops being a choice and becomes a wall.
So the page is ordered the way a customer actually thinks about the bank: personal data first (who you are to us), then consent categories (what you've agreed to), then channels (how to reach you), then external access (who else can see your data). Each block stands on its own and can be acted on without touching the others.
The consent text itself is legal ("I permit HDFC Bank to process my data..."). It has to be exact, and exact is rarely readable. So the plain-language category names carry the meaning up front, and the legal statement sits one layer behind: present, accessible, never the first thing you read.
A customer who understands "Borrowing money: Loans and Credit Card" makes a better choice than one handed the verbatim clause. The cost was a review loop, every label checked against the legal text for accuracy, which protected both the customer and the bank.
Customers also need to understand their rights under the new law. But a primer dropped into the middle of a task is where completion goes to die. DPDPA context (how data is safeguarded, Data Principal Rights, FAQs) lives in a persistent side panel on desktop, and below the task on mobile. There when you reach for it, never in the way.
The Purpose, Data Subject, and Receipts tables carry dozens of columns: product, category, status, version, collection point, application, timestamps. The easy build is a spreadsheet. The right build is something an operations team can read at a glance, every day, without drowning.
Operations teams scan for anomalies; they do not read rows top to bottom. So color-coded category tags (Loan, Credit Card, Forex Card, Account) became the primary visual anchor, with status and version surfaced, and columns ordered by what an operator acts on first. They can spot what needs attention without opening every row.
Color carrying meaning only works if it means the same thing everywhere. That became a system constraint, held consistent across every admin surface so a tag never had to be relearned.
Consent statements are managed by type, mandatory or optional, and mapped to purposes. This is the seam where the operator's legal text becomes the customer's plain-language choice, and it had to stay legible to the people maintaining it.
Underneath both sides sits the receipt: an immutable record of every consent transaction, who agreed, to what, when, and where. It is the layer that turns 400M+ records from a number into something a regulator can actually check.
These are UnifyApps' reported figures from the HDFC deployment. I did not measure them, but I designed the surfaces that made them possible.
For 30M+ customers across loans, credit cards, forex, accounts, and wealth products.
By replacing manual and fragmented consent processes with a unified, automated platform.
For new initiatives requiring consent, because the infrastructure was now in place.
Through precise channel preference management across 3M+ daily communications.
Across HDFC's Data Privacy Office, Finance, and Legal for 30M+ customers.