"Hello, I’m calling from Bajaj Finance. Do you want a loan?" Have you received such calls from India’s largest non-bank? I have; in fact, plenty of them despite being on the do-not-disturb (DND) list. They are like guided missiles—nearly impossible to escape. There are jokes, memes, angry social-media posts, snap polls, nasty call records, and whatnot, about it.
Its call centres are run at an “industrial scale”, and Bajaj has mined it like no other bank or non-bank. The company has a large loan book of ~$28 billion. And its existing base of customers alone accounts for a rich 60-65% of the loans; for any other non-bank that would be 35-40%.
Even at that size, it has managed to grow at an impressive ~30% for years. But that growth has now started to dip. On 5 January, when Bajaj Finance published its December-quarter numbers, it said its interest income grew 27% to Rs 21,900 crore (~$2.7 billion). The market still punished it with an 8% fall in stock prices on that day. Analysts say, “It is a prisoner of its own growth rate”.
Lenders have many ways to acquire borrowers, but for Bajaj—a 36-year-old company that grew in the call-centre era—teleselling is an enduring channel. It has a team of 4,500+ outsourced call-centre agents. For better results, Bajaj severed its 10-year-old partnership with TCS E-Serve, in 2021 and has since set up eight regional call centres.
You may wonder how much one can innovate on this decades-old technique. Wait until you read about how Bajaj operates, attaching each of its 50-odd products to a call-centre, managing sundry P&Ls, working around the DND, and more.
The company, aware how these pesky calls lead to irate customers, updated its governance mechanism every day twice or thrice - I'm getting more than 3 times daily basis from PAN INDIA bajaj finance - how wonderfully lays out that there’s no escaping these calls Onto the anatomy of Bajaj Finance’s loan calls
