Equanimity is his middle name—or it would be, if Sanjiv Bajaj were the sort of person who drew attention to such things. Hype and hoopla are not his style. He’d rather let the fabulous financial services franchise he’s built do all the talking, and talk it does: with assets of over Rs 5 lakh crore and close to 120 million customers, Bajaj Finance has left the competition so far behind they’d need a loan to catch up.
In the stock market too, Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv—the Bajaj twins, as they are known—rub shoulders comfortably with the country’s biggest banks.
Not many know that Rahul Bajaj’s younger son began his career as an apprentice on the shop floors of Tata Motors— not Bajaj Auto, which must have made for some interesting family dinners. He put his engineering skills to good use, and when the time came to build the financial services business, he took it in his stride. As he tells it, he never really missed being at Bajaj Auto, because all he had wanted since his days at Harvard was to be an entrepreneur. That’s Bajaj for you — taking life as it comes, the living embodiment of sthithapragya, a man unbothered by the road not taken.
The vision was clear: cash in on India’s consumption boom by making it simple and affordable for households to fulfil their aspirations. Convinced that cheap smartphones and low-cost high-speed data would turn financial services on its head, Bajaj Finance went all out—venturing into places banks had never set foot, cross-selling products with a tenacity that earned it wallet shares of anywhere between 14 and 53%.
Bajaj had also clocked early that his biggest competitor wasn’t a rival bank or shadow lender — it was the humble credit card. His answer was an EMI card that proved a runaway hit, with 60% of borrowers reaching for it.
Two decades on, what has emerged is a top-class franchise — well-capitalised, with a de-risked portfolio, low delinquencies and a well-earned reputation for moving at speed. The life and general insurance businesses are strong in their own right, confident enough that the Group recently bought out partner Allianz’s stake rather than share the upside any further. And where Bajaj has always held an edge is technology.
The next frontier is Fin-AI, an artificial intelligence initiative already delivering measurable outcomes — one that Bajaj believes will shift the entire business from a product-centric to a customer-centric model and help double the customer base in five years. At a company already operating at this scale, a compounded growth target of 20% over the next four to five years would be audacious coming from anyone else. From Bajaj, it sounds like a plan.
Central to that confidence is talent. That the best minds in the industry have chosen to work with the Group says something about the kind of organisation Bajaj has built — and the kind of leader he is. At 56, he is, by all accounts, as driven as he was at 36; the years have not dimmed the enthusiasm one bit. He has the experience to know how to play the game and, importantly, the runway to build something on the scale of Kotak Mahindra Bank — an institution he has long admired. He also knows, with characteristic practicality, that none of this happens without staying sharp.
He may not be on the basketball court as often as he’d like, but he swims, plays tennis and keeps the mind as fit as the body. Away from Mumbai’s relentless pace, he retreats to the quiet of Pune — family, Dire Straits, some jazz, and the particular contentment of a man who has little left to prove and a great deal still left to build.