AI Drives Bajaj Fin''s Loan Growth: 10,000 Loans/Month

Mumbai, Mar 19 (PTI) Billionaire Sanjiv Bajaj on Wednesday disagreed with notions of artificial intelligence (AI) being a hype, pointing that the non-bank lender headed by him is using it for contacting customers and also end-to-end loan underwriting.

Bajaj Finserv is disburse 10,000 loans a month using AI tools in which up to Rs 150 crore are being disbursed, Chairman and Managing Director of Bajaj Finserv said while speaking at Lokmat Maharashtrian of the Year Awards here.

"To a lot of people, it is hype. We think for our industry, it is very very real. We are seeing significant improvements," Bajaj said.

It can be noted that Infosys Co-Founder N R Narayana Murthy had recently raised concerns about AI, calling that some of the services being sold as futuristic are "silly, old programmes".

Bajaj said his company has been actively using AI for over a year, and added that 80 per cent of the content used in digital marketing is curated using AI.

Apart from that, it has also implemented a pilot generative AI project, wherein customer contact is being handled by the platform.

The company can handle requests in six languages, including English, and the tool responds specifically to the questions being raised by a customer, he said.

The same GenAI platform is also helping it give out over 10,000 loans, involving disbursements of up to Rs 150 crore a month, which may be relatively small when compared to the over 35 lakh loans the company makes a month, but is a significant progress given that it is end-to-end automation, Bajaj said.

Due to fears such as hallucination, the company has ensured that humans oversee the entire process, he said.

The company does not insist on the amount of time put in by an employee per week, but assesses her contributions through the output, Bajaj said.

Favouring working from offices rather than homes, he said innovation cannot happen by conversing on four zoom screens and requires people to be on the ground, working together.

On its recent announcement on the Rs 24,000 crore stake-buy of Allianz in its insurance joint ventures, Bajaj said both partners wanted to steer their own businesses, given the opportunities seen by each one of them in the under-penetrated Indian market and an "amicable" call was taken to go their own ways.

He said both entities are still partners and the dissolution of the venture, regulatory approvals, etc, are yet to happen.

"We very amicably decided that we (Bajaj) will buy them out... each one gets to plot their own destiny (this way). I'm sure in time to come, you will hear from them," he said, replying to a poser on media reports of Allianz planning a tie-up with Jio Financial Services.

There is a need for the states to improve the ease of doing business, Bajaj said, lauding the central government for taking measures on this front.

On the issue of pesky calls, he said over 95 per cent of such calls are made by third party agents and not by the company itself, and when compared with the volume of business it transacts, the complaints are very minimal.

He said the company processes 45 million payments a month, and gets only 400 calls per month.