Everyone bet on PhonePe and CRED. Bajaj Finance got there first.

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Take a look at First Principles with Riyaaz Amlani: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/impresarios-riyaaz-amlani-on-25-years-of-selling-time-not-food-and-surviving-four-near-deaths/These days it’s fashionable to have an AI story, no matter what you do. But in December 2024, Bajaj Finance took it a few steps further. Instead of calling itself "a lender investing in AI," it started to describe itself as a "FinAI company" - a category of one, which it committed to in a five-year plan to FY29. Eighteen months in, no other Indian lender is putting AI on their slides the way Bajaj Finance is. Here are some of them : 31 million voice interactions converted into data last quarter. 27 autonomous agents live, 118 more planned. 600,000 loans on a single Diwali day, up from a pre-AI ceiling of 100,000. And next Diwali, they're aiming for a million.A few years ago, the obvious answer to who would win Indian finance's AI era was the digital natives — PhonePe, CRED, the cloud-born fintechs with no call centres and zero baggage. Instead, the company that started financing two-wheelers and still runs one of India's largest outbound calling operations is out in front. The thing that looked like Bajaj's archaic legacy is turning out to be its moat.What else did Bajaj Finance have that got it here? And how long before the others get there too?Praveen is joined by Seetharaman G, Deputy Editor at The Ken, who just spent 5.5 hours on Bajaj's history for Intermission, The Ken’s new longform video podcast — and Vasuta Agarwal, Chief Revenue Officer at Gnani.ai, which which provides Voice AI to enterprises.The episode works through four pieces of Bajaj's edge: the data it built around its consumer-durables network, the incentive of being a publicly listed NBFC without access to cheap deposits, the leverage of buying from a voice AI market with dozens of competing vendors, and the DNA that may not be replicable i.e the willingness to fight for every inch, sustained under one CEO since 2007.References: Intermission Ep 2 on Bajaj