Bajaj Finance Brand Guidelines: A 1987 Pune Lender, a 2007 Demerger & a 2010 Name

A finance arm for two- and three-wheelers.

Bajaj Finance began as a captive lender for a vehicle maker. English Wikipedia says it was incorporated on 25 March 1987 as Bajaj Auto Finance Limited, a non-banking financial company whose first job was to finance buyers of Bajaj two- and three-wheelers: scooters, motorcycles and auto-rickshaws from the group whose vehicle business is covered in our Bajaj guide. The company is based in Pune, the city in Maharashtra that is also home to Bajaj Auto.

For about a decade it stayed close to that vehicle book. English Wikipedia says that after some eleven years in auto finance it made its first public issue of shares and was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India. Around the turn of the century it moved into consumer durables finance, lending small sums for household goods bought in shops, and in later years it added business loans and loans against property.

The larger change came in the group structure. English Wikipedia’s article on Bajaj Finserv says the financial services and wind energy businesses were moved into that company as part of a demerger from Bajaj Auto Limited, approved by the High Court of Judicature at Bombay by an order dated 18 December 2007. Bajaj Holdings and Investments, the company left holding the original group’s stakes, became the parent of Bajaj Finserv, and Bajaj Finserv became the parent of the lender.

In 2010 the registered name changed from Bajaj Auto Finance Limited to Bajaj Finance Limited. English Wikipedia says the change was made to reflect the wider scope of its operations, which by then reached well beyond vehicles.

Consumer, small-business and property lending.

English Wikipedia classes Bajaj Finance today as a deposit-taking non-banking financial company. As of March 2023, English Wikipedia says, its business covered consumer lending, lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, commercial lending, rural lending, deposits and wealth management, sold through its own branches, rural locations and a wide network of partner stores. In January 2023 it launched a loan against property business for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

Two subsidiaries carry parts of the work under their own names. Bajaj Housing Finance offers home loans, loans against property and lease rental discounting, and went public with an initial public offering in 2024. Bajaj Financial Securities, which trades as Bajaj Broking, handles equities trading. Around the lender, Bajaj Finserv also holds the group’s life and general insurers, an asset manager and a digital marketplace for financial products, according to English Wikipedia; the general insurer, formerly Bajaj Allianz General Insurance and now Bajaj General Insurance, is the subject of our Bajaj General Insurance guide.

Card products have been part of the story. English Wikipedia says the company issued co-branded credit cards with RBL Bank and DBS Bank, ended those partnerships in December 2024 after new Reserve Bank of India rules limited the role of non-bank partners, and in early 2025 launched a co-branded Insta EMI card with Bharti Airtel.

Regulation shapes the brand as much as products do. In September 2022 the Reserve Bank of India placed Bajaj Finance among the sixteen NBFCs in its upper layer under scale-based regulation, English Wikipedia says. On 15 November 2023 the Reserve Bank announced that it had directed the company to stop sanctioning and disbursing loans under two products, eCOM and Insta EMI Card, with immediate effect. The press release tied the action to the digital lending guidelines, in particular the failure to issue Key Fact Statements to borrowers under those products and deficiencies in the statements issued for other digital loans, and said the restrictions would be reviewed once the deficiencies were put right. In May 2024, English Wikipedia says, the company told the stock exchanges in a filing that the Reserve Bank had lifted the restrictions after remedial action.

How India’s lenders and insurers present themselves.

India’s non-bank lenders and insurers tend to present themselves with bold, simple wordmarks, often set in blue, red, orange or gold, and with a group name placed first. Many began inside larger business houses, and the finance brand keeps the family or group name while a second word says what the company does: finance, capital, life, general insurance. Bajaj Finance, for example, started in 1987 as Bajaj Auto Finance, the lending arm of a vehicle maker, and Muthoot Finance carries the name of a Kerala family business that dates its roots to 1887.

The branch remains central. Gold-loan companies, vehicle lenders and rural lenders work through offices in small towns as well as cities, and their websites lead with branch locators and with product pages for gold, vehicle, home and personal loans. The insurers in this group organise their sites around policy types such as motor and health cover.

Apps now sit beside the branch network. Customers are pointed to mobile apps for loan statements, repayments, policy documents and renewals, and the Reserve Bank of India’s digital lending rules, including the Key Fact Statements it requires lenders to give borrowers, shape how those journeys are presented.

Much of what can be checked about these brands sits in public filings. Listed lenders and insurers publish annual reports, and many add sustainability or business responsibility reports, while the Reserve Bank and the insurance regulator, IRDAI, publish their own orders and press releases. This guide relies on those documents and on dated press coverage, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

A group name carried into lending.

The name tells the history. For more than twenty years the company carried the word “Auto” because its loans were tied to Bajaj vehicles; the 2010 change to Bajaj Finance dropped the vehicle and kept the group name that also appears on Bajaj scooters and rickshaws. The 2007 demerger placed it inside Bajaj Finserv, the group’s financial services holding company, so the lender, the insurers and the asset manager now sit side by side under the Bajaj name.

That family resemblance is the main design fact. A Bajaj Finance loan, a Bajaj Housing Finance home loan and a Bajaj Broking account all lead with the same surname, and the differences lie in the second word. The company lends through its own branches, rural locations and partner stores as well as digital products, and the Reserve Bank action of 2023 concerned two of those digital products.

For a design guide, Bajaj Finance shows how a group name can carry a captive vehicle lender into a broad consumer finance brand. Compare Bajaj, the vehicle maker whose name it shares, and Bajaj General Insurance, the group’s general insurer. For this guide we use a navy, a sky blue and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bajaj Finance’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.