Bajaj Life 2.0 completed: NBM rose from 11.1% to 24.5% over four quarters.

Non-par savings mix has reduced. Can you give a flavour of how were the markets for the non-par product, any pricing pressure, and strategy for FY27?

So Shreya, thanks for your question. See, non-par, the way we see it as a bucket of non-par plus annuities, because annuities are the same cast, structured differently. Our annuity actually mix doubled from 5% to 10% in the financial year. And yeah, overall non-par did come down from 21% to 16%, but overall if you look at it, broadly we are at 26% if you add non-par plus annuities. The market has actually looked at higher-age customers coming in. We are seeing a consistent shift in the market towards annuity. Our ticket size in annuities is actually doubled in the last year. As for the non-par market, policies amounting to INR5 lakhs and below have a tax benefit available. So it's really an impact on the market, there's nothing to do with the pricing etc. as of now from our side. There's fundamentally a shift to higher-age brackets.

On general insurance motor TP — reserving triangles look like the release in TP in FY26 has been higher (~INR 800 crores vs INR 600-700 crores in the last couple of years). Any colour on what has happened here?

If you look at, TP release is a factor of how the book develops, and TP is a long-tail book. So as the claims development happens and compared to reserving, how is it developing that's what has to be seen. So, on the numbers you mentioned, I don't see that there's a huge shift in terms of the release happening, which means that the company has adequately reserved over time. It's a natural phenomenon; I don't see any change in the philosophy of how it's progressing.

On Bajaj Direct — given concerns around business loans, are there any tightening measures we are taking from our end?

As a marketplace, we get a ringside view of the prevailing risk and resultant countermeasures by various manufacturers, and therefore they adjust the share of business that they take from our marketplace from time to time. As a distributor, however, from the total throughput point of view, while our mix across manufacturers changes depending upon their risk measures, this doesn't affect us being a distributor. Two years ago, the risk was much higher in the market, and therefore the resultant manufacturer actions, especially in business loans, were high. Over a period of time, we have seen portfolios behaving better. But anyways, we are insulated from any balance sheet and P&L impact of such risk behaving adversely in the manufacturer's portfolio. We choose our manufacturer partners very carefully and therefore our volumes are not affected and hence revenue is not affected.

On Bajaj Life — VNB margin trajectory from here and product mix targeted for FY27?

Directionally all our product segments are now profitable. So the fact that if there is ULIP, our ULIP is now profitable. As the product mix evolves, we've had an entire culture shift in all our businesses including agency channel, which has picked up term plans very well. We expect the trajectory of term to only increase from here on, and that should impact our VNB margins only positively. Vipin: in terms of product mix, we have always maintained that we would want to have a PAR at about 25% plus-minus, annuity plus non-par savings again in the 25% to 30% range, term we would aspire to be 10% plus, and ULIP will be about 40%. So that's the stable mix we would want to be operating at.

On AMC — break-even AUM and tenure, and new segments like PMS / AIF / SIFs?

On the AMC side, the break-even AUM for us would be close to about INR1 lakh crores, with the continued mix on equity versus debt versus passives. At this point, we are actively considering both the PMS as well as the SIF, so within the next one, one and a half years, we will be launching both of these business lines.

Bajaj Life — excluding GST impact, margin for the year was at 22%. With mitigation done, is it safe to say next year with same product mix we will report 22% margin?

So when we say we have mitigated, what that really means: as we exited March, for the month of March we have mitigated almost 90% to 92% the GST impact. A residual impact of 30-40 bps does exist. What we mean by mitigation: we have changed some of our products that we sell in the market. There has been a change in the product mix. Cost optimization continues for us, and we have renegotiated some of our commercials with our partners. So when we looked at the walk, we actually showed the gross GST impact. All the mitigants of that are part of our walk in terms of the new business mix and the profile.

On growth — second half operated on Balic 2.0, growth came back to mid-teens. Is this the growth going ahead, and will heavy lifting be done by agency channel?

You should see a better growth than what you saw in our second half. That much I can say. And all our businesses are in now a growth trajectory. On the bulk partners, the bancassurance side, we've added three significant partners in the last 18 months: Federal, AU, and Yes Bank. Now they should start kicking in. On the agency side, we did reconfigure; we actually stretched our reconfiguration in December. So we recorded an 8% growth Q-on-Q for the last two quarters for agency. This I would say is a little understated, you should expect it to be better. The product mix is now largely set and the input parameters that we are seeing in agency, like the number of partners we're adding, plus the number of policies we're adding in agency, the trajectory is only positive. Proprietary sales and direct channel — we did not grow as expected in proprietary sales last year, but all that growth will be back. So you should expect a higher growth.

On EV — assumption change of INR51 crores is predominantly related to which operating parameter, mortality or persistency?

For the portfolio basis, assumptions are holding good. You would see there has been a dip in our persistency and that's what largely is reflected in assumption change.

On general insurance — how are we seeing competitive intensity playing out in motor and group health lines of business?

If you look at the market, the combined ratio industry has moved up by about 7% percentage points, and in one quarter it moved to 128% and then moved to 121%. Now that always happens when the competitive intensity is high in the market. Yes, there is competitive intensity in some businesses like motor, GMC, even in fire also. For the last quarter it was more because of the EOM guidelines. I think a lot of companies which were above 30%, they wanted to ramp up their numbers so that they can come within 30% as per the EOM guidelines. We would slow down in places where we see competitive intensity moving up, and then when we see the pricing is right, then we move up. Because we have no pressure of EOM, we are one of those companies which have a comfortable expense of management. We just don't write business to get our EOM right, we write business where it makes sense to write.

On Bajaj Alternatives strategy — news of raising $1 billion. Can you talk about this?

This was one of the white spaces we had identified. Being a financial services powerhouse, we realized that Alt's business is something which is growing pretty healthily globally and not only in India, and we identified that as a white space last year and we called it out in the investor day. In the last six to eight months, we've built up the team, and as we speak, we are planning to start the PMS part. We've already got approval from SEBI. We should launch the listed equity in PMS very soon. On the other side, we are trying to launch some CAT II and CAT III AIFs, for which we have filed for approval with the regulator for a private equity AIF and a real estate AIF. Also the idea is to get into a GIFT City structure to attract some NRI and foreign investors. Beyond this, in the next few quarters, we will start talking about it as and when the business is launched.

On life insurance persistency — what's happening at industry level and for you also; persistency declined across companies this year. How do you see persistency trends going forward?

That's something that worries all of us and is a focus segment of the sector. Overall there was a set of products which were introduced by a few market leaders about 12 to 18 months back. These products were early gratification products for the customer, and we did see people then not continuing once they did get benefits already available. Now that we were all expecting lower persistency in the sector, the swing has been more than the expectation. But largely it is just one bucket that has impacted the entire sector. We've degrown by about 1.8%, we expect that the sector has actually degrown even further. We had this product with us earlier, but we did not launch until it became necessary because distribution was just simply lapping it up in the market. We've stopped selling this product and since October have anyways been bringing it down. Has it impacted profitability? No, because the persistency was already baked in. But these kind of things should largely be avoided in the sector.

On household preferences — protection annuity are growing well, but preference for mutual funds and equities increasing as secular trend. FDs and life insurance losing share. How do we stay relevant to capture the household savings pie?

We've ridded the SIP market in Bajaj Life as well. We today sell a lot of our ULIP plans in what we call as SISO. It's a trademark that we've taken. It's a systematic in, systematic out plan where you put in money every month into ULIPs and over a period of time take the benefit of staying in the market for longer and take the benefit of then getting equivalent to monthly benefits over a period of your lifetime. For under INR 2,50,000 ticket size, this product also has all tax benefits available. We've looked at the entire market and nobody's been able to run this distribution within the annual mode products. A lot of the product architecture is on structured benefits available to customers and we are largely linked to life goals. An annuity product, for example, is something that others cannot easily provide but life insurance companies offers them long-term guarantees. The rest is also linked to the distribution we keep creating, and there is still so much more scope. The life insurance sector is possibly invested most in terms of number of branches, frontline sales, and the number of advisors that we have.

On Finserv Markets — revenue has been quite flattish for a long time. What is the strategy here?

I'll break this into two parts. The company has two divisions. Bajaj Markets is our marketplace in BFSI, with 100 plus manufacturers as our partners across lending, insurance, AMCs, credit card offered by banks. There the revenues grew healthily up until FY'26, wherein owing to our migration of platform and owing to the need to be compliant to RBI's new DLD guidelines, we had decreased revenues for one year. But the revenues are coming back onto track in FY'27 as per our plan. Also, the nature of the revenues is changing. Now we have a few partnerships which have trail revenue, which provides it stability and non-linearity. Our stated aim of break-even very soon, probably by the end of this year, is a possibility. The second reason is that over the last four years, we have invested in building a technology services business. We offered these technology solutions to companies within the group, then we went outside of the group, then we went to Middle East, and now we have established a subsidiary in US.

On Bajaj Finserv Health — based on current trajectory, when do you expect break-even?

I think we are about two years from that is what we have envisaged. If you look at the business model the way we've built it over a period of time, from the scale perspective, I think we've achieved a significant part of it. We are seeing that the growth is healthy, 40% to 50% quarter-on-quarter, number of transactions are just moving up. It is the point at which the operating efficiency starts kicking in. What we did in our LRS was that 24 months from now we should start seeing an operating break-even. This is basis current estimate.

In Finserv Markets, are you also looking at an aggregator model like Paisabazaar?

As a marketplace, both Paisabazaar and our platform are not too different online. They have various manufacturers signed up with them, just as we have our own set of manufacturers who've signed up with us. Regarding the offline, I'm not sure what you mean by aggregators, that is generally the term used for DSAs in the offline world. We have our own omnichannel methods, but those are mostly to complete the customer journey and to assist the customers who've come online. So, if you mean doing a DSA business purely offline, then no, that's not the plan.

On IFRS 17 — why not declare those numbers or follow IFRS 17 guidelines from June?

As you know there is a lot of ambiguity around certain assumptions which one has to take while drawing the IFRS numbers. For example, level of aggregation, currently also, different companies who are reporting to IRDAI are following different methodologies. Given the quantum of lack of clarity which is there today in terms of standardizing things across various constituents, I think it's too early to start publishing these numbers. If we were a mono-line player, then it was fairly easy. But for a multi-line player like ours, taking a call without having any clarity from the regulator or the industry as such may not be the right thing. As an industry, at a council level, we've been working jointly with the other insurers to bring some kind of uniformity. From 1st of April '27, you will see most of us start publishing the numbers.

On retail health side — how has been the trend with you post GST cut?

If you look at the retail health, initially after GST, it did give business and then it move started getting back to normalization as to market. Avais, our growth of health was how much total? Avais Karmali: Quarter four, the total health growth for the company was standing at 30% versus the industry at 18.1%. Tapan: if you observe, the industry grew at 17% in quarter four, but our growth was over the industry in terms of overall growth for the segment. While there was an initial upside due to GST, overall I feel slowly coming back to normalcy as it progresses.

The wealth business comes under which company or which vertical?

So, the wealth company is being set up under Bajaj Finance.