Nirmal Jain

An IIM-Ahmedabad graduate, Mr Nirmal Jain is a Chartered Accountant and Cost Accountant by qualification. With a record of being among the toppers at academics, he stood second at the All India Chartered Accountancy exam. Armoured with all these qualifications before the age of 23, he was all set to take on the financial world.

Mr Jain began his career with Hindustan Lever Ltd. (now Hindustan Unilever) in 1989, where he made a significant contribution towards a rapid and profitable growth of the company’s commodity export business. He joined two brokers in 1995 to co-found an equity research unit called Inquire- Indian Equity Research, where he set new standards in equity research.

A year later, in 1995, he established his own financial research company, Probity Research and Services Private Ltd. The company had a good start and created a whopping revenue of approximately One crore INR, which was, however, not enough to please him. He thus decided to tap the potential of the internet and launched www.indiainfoline.com where he shared volumes of research data—their chief source of revenue—with the customers. Calling it a foolish move, several core team members of the company quit, not realising that this very ‘foolish move’ was going to offer a bigger scale ever possible to the company. Thus, India Infoline, and now IIFL was born.

Today, IIFL is recognised as one of the leading independent financial services companies in India with a presence in non-banking finance, wealth management, broking, financial products distribution and investment banking space and it has a leadership position in most businesses it does. Under Mr Jain’s visionary direction, today IIFL has a market capitalization of over Rs 19,000 crores and is backed by marquee global investors like Fairfax Group, private equity major General Atlantic and UK government’s private equity arm - CDC Group. IIFL Group has a customer base of four million across 8 countries. The NBFC operation has over 1,100 branches mostly in smaller towns and rural locations. The wealth business manages and advises over Rs 120,000 crores of assets and has over 10,000 wealthiest families as clients. IIFL Institutional Equities caters to over 300 global funds. IIFL is one of the most trusted BFSI brands in India as per The Economic Times.