Sanjiv Bajaj, Joint Chairman & Managing Director at Bajaj Capital Ltd

Sanjiv brings over 28 years of experience in shaping the strategic vision, growth, and innovation of one of India’s leading financial services firms. A Certified Financial Planner and Stanford-certified in Design Thinking, he combines deep expertise in wealth management, equity research, portfolio management, private banking, business development, and relationship management.

Under his leadership, Bajaj Capital continues to focus on building customer-centric, user-friendly financial solutions that address the evolving needs of India’s diverse market, while delivering long-term value through comprehensive financial planning, advisory, and investment solutions.

In an interaction with Sejal Singh B G, Correspondent at siliconindia. Sanjiv Bajaj, Joint Chairman & Managing Director at Bajaj Capital Ltd shared his insights on ‘Why India's Wealth Distribution Sector Cannot Survive on Algorithms Alone’.

He discusses the evolving role of financial advisors, the rise of phygital wealth management, India's persistent protection gap, the changing needs of investors beyond major metros, and why successful wealth distribution in India must balance technology with trust, context, and human understanding.

With SEBI aggressively pushing for direct mutual fund platforms and tightening expense ratio caps, how are organizations restructuring their revenue model away from traditional distribution commissions without pricing out retail investors?

SEBI isn't trying to make distribution redundant; it's asking the industry to be more transparent about the value it actually delivers. We've been through this before. Every major regulatory shift, from the removal of entry loads to the rationalization of expense ratios, has nudged firms to stop thinking in terms of transactions and start thinking in terms of relationships.

Under the old commission structure, a lot of value was bundled together without being explicitly called out, the hand-holding during volatile markets, the conversations that help families make sense of their money, and the support they need to stay on track. Investors today want that value spelled out, and honestly, that's a healthy shift for everyone.

Three things are happening as a result. Firms are building out fee-based planning alongside the traditional distribution business. They're widening the lens to cover investments, insurance, tax and estate planning together, rather than as separate conversations. And technology is quietly bringing servicing costs down, which is what lets us support someone starting a small SIP with the same care as a larger investor, without pricing them out. 

You have publicly spoken about building environments where ambitions aren't capped. How can a brick-and-mortar 'phygital' legacy firm compete on cost and speed with algorithm-driven discount fintechs when targeting Gen Z and millennial wealth creators?

Digital-first platforms are always going to win on onboarding, execution, and speed; that's simply what they're built for. We're not trying to outrun them at that game. What a firm with decades of experience brings instead is perspective. We've sat with families through market crashes, policy changes, weddings, illnesses, and successions. That kind of experience tells you that no two investors are on the same journey, however similar their portfolios may look on paper.

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That's really what ‘phygital’ means to us in practice: let technology handle the routine stuff such as  digital onboarding, KYC, portfolio updates, and goal tracking, and let people step in exactly when it matters, when someone is facing a big decision or a difficult year, whether it's retirement, a child's education, succession planning, or a market that's suddenly turned volatile.

Technology, for us, has always been in service of the relationship, not a replacement for it.

Technology can make wealth management faster and more efficient, but it is trust, context, and human understanding that make financial advice truly relevant

You've stated that Western models don't fit India because citizens struggle to separate risk cover from savings. If tax-saving scripts and ULIPs remain the primary drivers of Indian insurance, how do we solve the deep under-insurance gap for pure protection (Term/Health) products?

There's a question I ask families that tends to cut through everything else: if something happened to you tomorrow, would your family's financial life change?

Most people know the answer instantly. What they haven't done is translate that answer into actual cover. And I don't think awareness is what's missing anymore. Awareness has genuinely improved. The gap is behavioural. Insurance in India has historically been sold and bought as a savings product, something with a maturity value at the end of it, so pure protection can feel abstract by comparison, even though it's doing some of the most important work.

Which is why the conversation has to start somewhere else; we encourage families to put a solid protection foundation in place first like life, health, and critical illness insurance before they start looking at wealth creation or tax-efficient investing. Once that foundation exists, the rest of the financial plan can be built with real confidence.
Protection and wealth creation aren't competing priorities. They're just answering different questions.

As per-capita incomes rise outside major metros, what structural differences are you seeing in how a Tier-II business owner approaches wealth management versus a Tier-I corporate executive?

The real difference isn't risk appetite. If anything, business owners outside the metros are often more comfortable with uncertainty because they've lived with it throughout their working lives. The difference is in how their wealth is structured.

A salaried professional in a metro usually has a fairly clean financial picture, so planning is largely about optimization like asset allocation, retirement, and tax efficiency. For a business owner, personal wealth and the business itself are tangled together. Before we even get to investments, the first conversation is often about how much capital needs to stay in the business and how much can be set aside for the family's own goals.

Trust also gets built differently depending on where you are. In the metros; a lot of relationships start online or through an institutional referral. Across Tier-II and Tier-III India, trust still travels largely through personal recommendations and long-standing community ties. Technology helps everywhere, but in these markets, the relationship still does most of the work.

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Western wealth models treat gold as a mere inflation hedge and real estate as an illiquid luxury. Yet, for the average Indian household, these are core pillars of financial security. How can the Indian wealth distribution industry build mathematically sound portfolio models that respect these cultural realities, rather than forcing Western, equity-heavy playbooks onto an inherently risk-averse population?

I'd frame this a little differently. It's not about making room for cultural preferences; it's about building portfolios that actually reflect how Indian households live with money. Gold and property haven't stayed relevant to Indian families for sentimental reasons alone. They do real jobs.

Gold isn't just a long-term store of value; it's liquidity a family can turn to when they need it most. Property isn't just a number on a balance sheet, its stability, its emotional security, and increasingly, a source of income in retirement.
So, planning in India has to start by looking honestly at what a family already holds, and not by asking them to move away from it in favor of a cleaner spreadsheet.

The job is not to move families away from gold and property, but to build around what they already own like adding equities, fixed income, mutual funds and insurance in a way that aligns with their goals, risk appetite and time horizon.

There's no universal formula here. Good financial planning in India has to be rooted not just in sound financial principles, but also in the culture, values and emotions that shape how families save, invest and think about risk. If we ignore that human context, even the most technically sound plan can struggle to remain relevant in real life.