Bajaj Finance aims to have a share of 4-5% in retail credit over the next five years as it builds new lines of business, MD-designate Anup Saha tells Shobhana Subramanian. Excerpts:
In this digital age, how many customers do you expect to be servicing in the next five years? How big is the cross-selling opportunity?
Our customer franchise in the third quarter stood at 97.12 million and we are on course to cross the 100-million milestone in FY25.
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As Bajaj Finance transitions to BFL 3.0 — a Fin-AI company, the target is to be a pre-eminent choice for all the financial needs of its customers. Our ambition is to be a 200-million-consumer company with a share of 3-4% in total credit and 4-5% in retail credit in India over the next five years. The next 100 million customers will be acquired organically and through strategic partnerships.
We recently forged a partnership with Bharti Airtel, one of India’s largest telecom service providers. As Airtel will offer Bajaj Finance’s products on its Airtel Thanks App, the partnership presents an opportunity to expand digital financial inclusion and transform last-mile delivery.
The partnership will also leverage Airtel’s nationwide network of stores. Undoubtedly, there is substantial opportunity for cross-sell.
Another key lever of the growth will be our AI-enabled technology architecture which integrates AI across our processes to deliver significant operating leverage and create a virtuous growth cycle.
Would you be exploring any new areas and will there be a significant change in the loan mix?
We are building new lines of business in a calibrated manner based on an analysis of incoming risk data.
We are witnessing a strong momentum in our newly-launched businesses such as new car financing, gold loan, loan against property, microfinance, tractor finance and commercial vehicle finance. These businesses have started contributing nearly 3% of AUM growth. We are investing to scale them further while ensuring that our portfolio mix does not change significantly from the current level.
We are also looking at green financing as a new product line and have recently started financing solar and EV products for retail and MSME customers. For the medium term, we have completed our investments in launching new businesses.
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