MC EXCLUSIVE Sanjiv Bajaj: The bug of entrepreneurship, not just finance, was what drove me

• Sanjiv Bajaj boosted Bajaj Finance and Finserv's market cap to Rs 10 lakh crore
• He launched Bajaj Marketplace, Bajaj Health, and Bajaj Technology ventures.
• Bajaj Health & Tech platforms now serve millions and expand globally

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Sanjiv Bajaj has taken the combined market cap of Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv from a little less than Rs 2000 crore in 2007 (when Finserv listed) to around Rs 10 lakh crore today. Which means the combined market cap of the two companies doubled every two years in the past 18 years. Such a consistent pace of high growth have few, if any, parallels in India.

What makes Sanjiv Bajaj tick? It’s the bug of entrepreneurship. That was my key takeaway after an hour-long chat with Sanjiv for the Moneycontrol series — Latha & The Leaders.

“Were you disappointed when you didn’t get Bajaj Auto? Did you like finance?” were my first few questions to Sanjiv as I tried to gauge the secret of such a stupendous success story.

“I did not dislike finance,” said Sanjiv. “But what thrilled me (about leading Bajaj Finance) was being an entrepreneur,” he said. “I went to Harvard Business School, and over those two years at Harvard, when I read through case studies, saw all the entrepreneurial opportunities, the bug to build business was a very real bug,” he explained.

“It was very clear to me that financial services offered a great opportunity because India was growing. So financial services would grow. Second, it gave me their entrepreneurial opportunity. These were small businesses. So, I had that chance.”

But Sanjiv hasn’t stopped with Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv or the latter’s two other subsidiaries — the life and non-life insurance companies.

In fact, he has gone on to build three more very interesting companies — Bajaj Marketplace, Bajaj Health and Bajaj Technologies.

“Over the last decade and a half, what I've realized is I enjoy building businesses,” he said, with much enthusiasm.

Indeed all these three companies are interesting entrepreneurial ventures – which can be enlarged into separate businesses, though Sanjiv insists they are only being built as adjacencies to the main finance business of the conglomerate.

“Our desire is for Bajaj Finserv to be the financial life cycle partner to every Indian. Over the last 15 years, we have built a set of companies that manufacture financial products from loans to insurance products. Now, mutual funds. We will launch our alternate investments platform next year. We are seriously evaluating wealth distribution,” said Sanjiv, enlisting the list of finance products his group offers.

But his entrepreneurship shines through more in the way he has approached distribution of finance products – and not just Bajaj’s products.

“We were aware, especially in the last decade, that the world was digitizing, India is digitizing and may be there are customers who want to go to a platform to get a larger selection. And we did not want to be away from that customer. We created three digital platforms — the financial services marketplace, the health aggregation platform, and a digital broking platform."

Bajaj Marketplace is a platform on the lines of PB Fintech which sells a range of insurance, fixed deposit, mutual fund and loan products, not just Bajaj’s products. It has over 100 partners — from mutual funds to insurance companies to banks — and is doing a few million transactions a month.

“Unlike a startup platform that requires funds to grow, we didn't need to go outside to bring those funds. Some of these businesses are coming to a scale where we are no longer burning money," he said.

Bajaj Markets is actually an intelligent way to capture clients coming through the digital route, to ensure Bajaj’s own products are as good as or better than the competition. But above all, Sanjiv is prepared to one day spin it off as an independent company.

"We will go out and bring strategic partners on our platform, both to help the platform grow, but also to help reduce any anxiety, if it exists, of being partial to ourselves," he added, while answering queries about whether his rivals accept his platform as neutral, or not.

Bajaj Health

Bajaj Health is an even more interesting platform with links to anything connected with health. It aggregates 120,000 plus doctors and clinics, 15,000 plus hospitals, all the top laboratories, wellness, yoga, physiotherapy and pharmacy. “Bajaj Health is doing close to six million transactions a quarter. We are processing close to half a million appointments a quarter," he added.

“This is a combination of digital video consultations, (and) physical when you need to. All your data from your prescription, to your medical records, all get stored in your own data locker. So, it stays with you for the rest of your life. It's especially useful when one changes cities, and hence, changes doctors. Most people lose all their medical information,” he added.

What’s in it for Bajaj? “It keeps us first in the customers’ eye,” he explains, adding that the platform brings insurance customers to Bajaj but it does more to attract corporate customers. Last year, Bajaj Health bought Vidal Healthcare Services (Vidal Health) — one of India's largest healthcare administrators and a leading Third-Party Administrator (TPA) of insurance.

This acquisition expanded Bajaj Health’s capabilities to offer a full range of healthcare services, including outpatient department (OPD), wellness, and hospitalization benefits. “This allows us to go to corporates to offer all these services," he added.

Would Bajaj Finserv or Sanjiv Bajaj or the holding company — Bajaj Holdings — venture into the health vertical fully and build hospital chains, I asked. “There is no such plan right now," he said firmly.

But given his entrepreneurial penchant, “never says never” was the way I understood him.

BAJAJ TECHNOLOGY

Of all of Finserv’s subsidiaries, Bajaj Technology Services best reflects Sanjiv’s zeal for entrepreneurship. “That is something that happened really quite by serendipity,” he said. “We started very early on building tech for financial services. Today, most large corporates, whatever type of company you may be, has data in various different silos. We started our first data lake in 2014 in Bajaj Finance. So we have a 10-11 year experience of using unstructured data. We then added a whole bunch of additional capabilities around apps, around cyber security, around fraud, around cross-selling, around customer service, blending offline and online,” he explained.

The Bajaj consumer app tracks a customer’s journey much like Netflix enables a subscriber to watch a movie on iPad and then continue it on TV.

"So, as we built all these capabilities, and again, as I told you right in the beginning, I enjoy building businesses, but not as hobbies. So we said, why don't we offer this to others also in the financial services domain? Because we understand that domain.”

Bajaj Technology’s fintech tools are now available not only in India but also in Middle East and shortly, the group will establish a company in the US.

So, this makes Sanjiv Bajaj not just a finance entrepreneur, but also a tech entrepreneur.