Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries demerged its financial services business and listed it separately on the stock exchanges on August 21, 2023. In the two years since, Jio Financial Services (JFS) has made rapid progress across various verticals, from payments bank to asset management, to reinsurance, building a strong platform to fuel its financial services ambitions.
The company, which has already joined hands with global companies, like BlackRock and Allianz Europe, plans more strategic partnerships in the financial services space over the coming months, JFS MD and CEO Hitesh Sethia said on Thursday.
“Over the coming months, you will see us entering more such strategic tie-ups with leading financial services providers to further expand our portfolio with new products, designed to cater to the financial needs of our customers holistically,” he told shareholders at the company’s second annual general meeting.
At a time when more and more Indians are looking to invest, protect their families and assets through insurance, and avail credit, technology is ensuring that world-class financial products that were once considered out of reach, are now within everyone’s grasp, he noted.
“This is a perfect environment for a company like ours – digital first, trusted, and well capitalised – to step in and make access to financial products simple, affordable and universal,” he added.
The company’s mutual fund joint venture with the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock is quickly ramping up. Its first new fund offerings, which included three debt and money market funds, raised Rs 17,800 crore, from 90 institutional and 67,000 retail investors.
The AMC now has eight funds across debt and equity index fund categories. Sethia said the AMC would introduce new and innovative offerings in the market across actively as well as passively managed funds.
The partnership with BlackRock will not just be limited to mutual funds, but also expand to wealth management and broking. JFS is “on track” with laying the groundwork for wealth management and broking entities and their operations are likely to commence over coming quarters, said Sethia. All the three JioBlack entities have the necessary regulatory approvals to commence operations, he added.
JFS’s entry into the capital markets space comes at a time when the industry has seen a rapid growth over the last few years, with millions of new investors taking to equity market investing, either directly or through mutual funds. The assets of the mutual funds industry crossed Rs 75 lakh crore at the end of July 2025. The total number of demat accounts have also crossed 20 crore recently.
Elsewhere, in the lending business, Jio’s NBFC has seen its AUMs surge to Rs 11,665 crore in the quarter ended June 30, 2025 from Rs 217 crore, a year ago.
“We are pursuing a risk-calibrated growth strategy in this business, by consciously targeting prime and near-prime customers as well as high-rated corporate borrowers. This disciplined focus is critical to building a high-quality, diversified loan portfolio that aligns with our principles of sound capital deployment and sustainable growth,” said Sethia.
JFS is also expanding its payment business through a network of 50,000 business correspondents and now has a CASA (current account and savings account) customer base of 2.58 million as of the end of the June quarter. Its total CASA deposits touched Rs 358 crore, last quarter.
Sethia pointed out that Jio Payments Bank has been empanelled by the National Highways Authority of India as an acquirer bank for toll processing, with a mandate to manage five national highway toll plazas.
Just last month, JFS had entered into a binding agreement with Allianz to form a 50:50 reinsurance joint venture. The two also signed non-binding agreements to set up equally owned joint ventures in the general and life insurance space. Allianz earlier had a life as well as general insurance joint ventures with Bajaj Finserv.
“Our partnership with Allianz is designed to create a reinsurance and insurance framework that will enhance risk protection for Indian consumers and businesses at scale,” said JFS Chairman K. V. Kamath.
Financial year 2024-25 had been a pivotal year for the company, where it successfully operationalised new ventures and secured key regulatory approvals, while also implementing a sophisticated data intelligence engine, which would form the backbone of its financial service offerings, he told shareholders.
While JFS is expanding across various verticals in the space, it will also look to leverage its various partnerships to launch innovative products.
The payments bank plans to launch a new product – Savings Pro – a savings account where idle cash will be auto invested in overnight mutual funds for better returns. Overnight funds are fixed income funds, but here they invest debt instruments with only one day maturity, making them fairly safe.