BAJAJ FINANCE'S FIRE FIGHTER

Rajeev Jain has led the Pune-headquartered company's digital transition and launched new lines of businesses, adding to its heft.

- NEVIN JOHN

LEARNING NEVER ENDS for Rajeev Jain. He and his management team tracks one international company every year that has made a transformational impact on the business it operates in. The team analyses financial releases and investor presentations of the last 10 years and deploys the learnings in Bajaj Finance Ltd (BFL). In 2022, the study was on Starbucks. A year before that, it was Microsoft, and prior to that, bookings.com.

The learnings have held Jain in good stead. When things go downhill, he prefers to keep his head down and chart out the rescue plan. In the first 15 months when Covid-19 hit BFL’s lending business, Jain focused on managing operating costs and debts, besides building a digital platform to reach customers. When the business came out of turbulence, he presented a plan to expand operations by adding new businesses.

It has helped BFL out of the crisis, says Jain, who joined the company in 2008 as its first CEO. “If 1.6% customers defaulted pre-pandemic, it was 3x during the lockdown. In the lending business, default has a multiplier effect. So the outcome became 10x. The management usually prepares for 1 to 1.3x,” says the current MD & CEO. According to Jain, the only way to navigate through a crisis is to keep your head down, work and improve. “If you fret and fume, the desired results cannot be achieved,” he says.