Bajaj Finance customers will soon have 'the right to be forgotten': Sanjiv Bajaj

/2 min read

ADVERTISEMENT

Customers will have the right to be forgotten within three months, says Bajaj Finserv chairman
Bajaj Finance customers will soon have 'the right to be forgotten': Sanjiv Bajaj
Sanjiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Finserv Credits: Narendra Bisht

Bajaj Finserv chairman and managing director Sanjiv Bajaj said mobile phone users will soon have the "right to be forgotten" by Bajaj Finance as the non-banking financial company plans to reduce the value of loans pushed via telemarketing calls to less than 10% of its business.

Loans solicited through "push calls" account for less than 15% of the NBFC's business, according to Bajaj. The aim is to bring it down to less than 10% or even take it down to zero so that there would only be service calls, he said during a press conference at the launch of Bajaj Finserv Asset Management Company in Mumbai.

As the NBFC becomes more digital, all promotional activities will happen through digital channels, Bajaj said.

"You will see in three months' time on our website and our web app an option, you click it, we will never bother you again. You'll have the right to be forgotten by us but then make sure you don't come back to us for our products and solutions," Bajaj said on telemarketing calls that are used to push loans.

Fortune India Latest Edition is Out Now!
40u40: India's Brightest Young Business Minds

July 2025

In the world’s youngest nation—where over 65% of the population is under 35—India’s future is already being shaped by those bold enough to lead it. From boardrooms to breakout ideas, a new generation of business leaders is rewriting the rules. This year's Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 celebrates these changemakers—icons in the making like Akash Ambani, Kaviya Kalanithi Maran, Shashwat Goenka, Parth Jindal, Aman Mehta, and Devansh Jain—who are not just carrying forward legacies but boldly reimagining them for a new era. Alongside them are first-generation disruptors like Sagar Daryani, scaling Wow! Momo with a vision to take ₹100 momos to 5,000 cities, and Palak Shah, turning the Banarasi weave into a global fashion story with Ekaya Banaras. These are the entrepreneurs turning ambition into scale. And even beyond traditional industry, the entrepreneurial wave is pulling in creative forces—Ranveer Singh, for instance, is shaking up wellness and nutrition with Bold Care and SuperYou, proving that passion, backed by purpose, is the new blueprint for building brands.

Read Now

For the few thousand who do get bothered, a lot of these calls are not actually from Bajaj Finance as there are so many numbers they come from, he said.

"The cross-sell capabilities that we build are on pre-approved loans, insurance, mutual funds within what regulations allow rather than pushing it or pro-actively calling the customer," the Bajaj Finsev chairman said.

These comments come at a time when India's telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), has asked service providers such as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel to curb the menace of unsolicited commercial communication (UCC).

UCC is a major source of inconvenience to the public and impinges on the privacy of individuals and there has been a consistent focus and drive to implement "UCC detect solutions" in order to control spam on telecom networks, the regulator said earlier this year.

Mobile phone users in India get nearly 17 spam calls on average per month, according to a Truecaller report released in 2021. The vast majority 93.5% of all spam in India are sales or telemarketing calls.

As per Truecaller, one of the common scams in the country remains the KYC (know your customer) scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank or digital payment service, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). TRAI has directed telecom operators to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based anti-phishing systems to detect spam calls and messages. The regulator has also proposed a framework for sharing UCC data detected by service providers.

Bajaj Finance's net profit rose 30% year-on-year to ₹3,158 crore for the January-March quarter compared with ₹2,420 crore in the corresponding period last year. The non-bank lender's net interest income (NII) increased 28% to ₹7,771 crore in the fourth quarter. The number of new loans booked during the quarter grew 20% to 7.56 million as against 6.28 million in the year-ago period.

Fortune India is now on WhatsApp! Get the latest updates from the world of business and economy delivered straight to your phone. Subscribe now.