Jio Financial Services (JFS) is looking to launch both general and life insurance businesses, with a start date targeted for 2026, according to the company’s CEO and managing director Hitesh Sethia.
“We hope to start insurance manufacturing in 2026, subject to regulatory approvals,” Sethia told Indian news agency PTI.
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JFS has already entered the reinsurance segment through an equal joint venture with Allianz. Sethia indicated the company expects to work with the same partner for its planned general and life insurance businesses.
He said JFS is also building the teams required for the insurance expansion in parallel.
In lending, Sethia said the company is not looking to move immediately into unsecured loans or consumer durable financing. For now, the emphasis is on improving profitability.
He said JFS is focusing on secured lending products aimed at prime and near-prime customers, guided by internal limits on risk and capital.
Under this approach, the company currently operates in about 20 cities that it views as offering stronger customer profiles for these segments.
Sethia cited a higher incidence of non-performing loans in consumer durable and unsecured lending, and said home loan delinquencies are a small fraction by comparison.
“As our NBFC’s business and profitability grow in line with our current risk appetite, and we learn more about our customers and the business, we will, at the appropriate time, evaluate exploring newer lending solutions at different levels of the risk spectrum,” he said.
Separately, JFS is already distributing third-party unsecured products, including personal loans and credit cards, through its agentic neural marketplace on the Jiofinance App.
On the app’s expanded offerings, Sethia said it is seeing very good traction, which he linked to hyper-personalised propositions and a new conversational user interface.
