IN A QUIET, tree-lined lane in Pune’s Viman Nagar, far removed from the bustle of Mumbai’s central business districts, sits one of India’s most formidable financial engines, Bajaj Finance Ltd (BFL). Valued at over $75 billion, it now ranks 52nd among the world’s most valuable financial services companies by market cap.

It’s here that Rajeev Jain, the 55-year-old vice chairman and MD of Bajaj Finance, greets Fortune India on an October afternoon. Dressed casually in a dark blue tee and faded blue jeans, he could easily pass off as a startup founder rather than the highest paid non-bank executive at ₹105 crore (salary plus stock options). But behind the understated demeanour is an architect of a near two-decade compounding story, 34% revenue growth and 48% profit growth annually, transforming a modest two-wheeler non-bank lender into one of India’s most admired financial powerhouses.

“I’m a workaholic… and if you take workaholism one notch higher, the manifestation of it is, we have a missionary zeal to make things happen,” says Jain, a line that feels prophetic given that he had to reassume charge as MD following the sudden exit of Arup Saha, his hand-picked successor. Groomed for over seven years, Saha quit within months over an unconfirmed brush for the top job at IndusInd Bank. Jain will now stay at the helm till 2028; his bigger task though is to keep the compounding engine running even as he works on a board-mandated succession timeline.

Under Jain, BFL has showcased a performance that would make even a Berkshire Hathaway purist pause. BFL delivered 25.7% CAGR and 35.15% CAGR over the past 5- and 10-year periods, respectively, vs 18.26% and 13.58%% for Berkshire. In the 18 years to FY25, assets under management crossed ₹4.16 lakh crore, but more pertinently, return on assets (RoA) has surged from 0.7% to 4.4%, and return on equity (RoE) from 2% to 19.5%, metrics that dwarf many global peers. Berkshire, by contrast, clocks an RoA of 5.44%, and an RoE of 9.64%.

At a market cap of ₹6.74 lakh crore, partly driven by a premium valuation multiple of 8x price-to-book, the franchise has been compounding earnings at 29% over a decade, implying profits could double every two and a half years. If that pace sustains, BFL could cross ₹30,000 crore in post-tax profits by FY28, giving a further fillip to valuations.

Yet, the man who has sweated it out to build this behemoth is more than happy to credit the late Nanoo Pamnani, and chairman Sanjiv Bajaj for creating a “conducive environment”. In conversation, he keeps circling back to a common theme — the relentless pursuit of going from “good to great”.

Having built resilience, Jain faces a much subtler test — not of survival but one of abundance.

In a compounding business, growth itself can become a sweet problem. Berkshire Hathaway learnt that with its 1972 acquisition of See’s Candies, a small California-based chocolate maker but a capital efficient machine.

Buffett called it the prototype of a dream business: a company that generated cash with little reinvestment need. But even See’s faced a paradox: how do you invest profitably when your core business can’t absorb more capital to generate higher returns? “We’ve tried 50 different ways to put money into See’s. If we knew a way to put additional money into See’s and produce returns a quarter of what we’re getting out of the existing business, we would do it in a second. We love it. We play around with different ideas, but we don’t know how to do it,” Buffett had commented.

So, is Bajaj Finance, too, approaching its own See’s Candies moment after 18 years of near-flawless growth? The challenge for BFL is whether every incremental ₹1 of capital can still fetch 4.4% RoA and 19.5% RoE that define the franchise today. Berkshire chanelled See’s surplus cash into new businesses, but Jain sees BFL’s dilemma playing out differently.

“It’s a fair question,” he admits, “We’re not there yet… Maybe five years from now, we’ll reach that point.” The See’s Candies equation for BFL is structural. As Bajaj Finance subsidiarises its arms and with Bajaj Housing Finance already listed, regulations will require the parent to reduce its stake from 88.70% to 75% within five years, in addition to taking its other subsidiary public. “That itself creates an excess capital situation in the firm,” says Jain. The effect is compounded by a narrowing gap between balance sheet growth (24%) and profit growth (22%). “Logically, I would like both to grow [at rates] very close to each other,” Jain says, “but that means I am not consuming capital”.

Yet, unlike Berkshire, which deployed See’s profits into other businesses, Jain believes the company will channel the surplus into organic growth within its existing ecosystem. “The journey of building good businesses or someday creating great businesses requires us to build organically because we enjoy doing it. The fun of building a business is as important to us as the benefits of a business. So, we will remain organic.”

To stay organic, Jain isn’t looking inward, that is, building new engines of growth within the franchise itself. His playbook is modelled not on conglomerate investing such as Berkshire’s, but on platform reinvention; that entails going the Amazon way.

It’s no coincidence that Jain is influenced by the Amazon playbook: a flywheel of data, technology, and customer engagement that monetises attention and ecosystems rather than just products.

“The AI age gives good companies a chance to become great. We want to use this opportunity [to go] from being a good company to hopefully being a great company,” he says.

Post-Covid, BFL has created “the Amazon of financial services,” a super app that offers loans, insurance, payments, mutual funds, gold loans, and even live shopping. The app already generates over 15% of BFL’s loan disbursals with a goal to hit 50% within three years. If Amazon has 14 scrolls, the Bajaj Finserv app has 14 scrolls too. If imitation is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, BFL has executed it well.

Like Amazon, BFL is now monetising engagement. The app has already earned ₹50 crore in ad revenue in FY25, with ambitions to scale that manifold. “Just as Amazon makes more from advertising than from selling goods, we’ll make more from engagement than from loans,” says Jain.

It’s a radical idea for a lender but Jain is convinced: “Digital is not a strategy. It’s a necessity. We’re building an ecosystem, not a product.”