How Piramal Finance runs 3 ads and lets its Instagram do the selling

Category introduction

Lending to ordinary Indian households and small firms is dominated by non-bank lenders, known as NBFCs. Bajaj Finance is the largest. Its assets under management were ₹4.44 lakh crore on 30 June 2025, across 4,192 branches. Tata Capital, which went public in October 2025, had ₹2.33 lakh crore and 1,516 branches on the same date.

Both big names advertise heavily, and mostly the same way: a product, a rate, a button. Bajaj's Insta EMI Card is the clearest case. For a smaller lender, copying that would mean paying for volume it cannot match.

Brand introduction

Piramal Finance began as Dewan Housing Finance, which the Piramal Group bought in September 2021. It was renamed Piramal Finance in April 2025 and merged into its listed parent Piramal Enterprises in September 2025. Wikipedia reports assets of ₹96,690 crore and 518 branches in 26 states in December 2025. It sells home, business, personal, gold and used-car loans.

The consumer brand is young. Its first campaign, “Hum kaagaz se zyaada neeyat dekhte hain” (we look at intent more than paperwork), launched with a new logo in January 2023. It aims at customers in smaller towns who may lack formal documents. Its Instagram account has about 857,000 followers.

Summary

Piramal Finance spends its effort on content and uses ads only to send people to it. Two of its three ads have a button to visit the Instagram profile. The third asks for a page like. Two reuse posts from the feed. The persuading happens in the posts.

The feed has three jobs. It carries the brand film (Neeyat), it teaches customers to spot scams, and it explains loans in plain Hinglish with a presenter. For a lender, trust is the product, and these are three ways to earn it without a rate on screen.

Problem statement and objective

This is our reading of the ads, not a brief Piramal has published. The problem looks like this. A lender with a young consumer brand faces rivals with far larger ad budgets. Its customers are cautious about fraud and about being turned down for lack of paperwork.

The objective that follows: build familiarity and trust first, get people to follow, and let the follower later become an applicant.

Execution: what the ads and the feed actually do

We read the full ad library (3 ads) and 366 Instagram posts from August 2024 to August 2026. We looked closely at 150 of the posts and decoded 60 for style.

The ads point at the profile

The three ads started on 17 and 24 August 2026. Their buttons read “Visit Instagram profile” (2) and “Like Page” (1). One shows a presenter promoting a WhatsApp service, with the same wording as a 4 June 2026 reel. One is a scam warning (“A call from Customer Care isn't always from customer care”), which matches an August 2026 post. The third is a static card, “Freedom to Say YES to Your Dreams”, that tells people to follow.

A film that works as reels

Trade press reported three new Neeyat films in early December 2025 (“Neeyat se banaya hai, toh neeyat se badhoge bhi”). On Instagram, three Neeyat reels went up on consecutive days, 28, 29 and 30 November 2025, and drew 6.1 million, 5.4 million and 4.3 million views. That is 15.8 million views in three days.

Scam awareness as a content pillar

34 of the 150 posts we looked at closely mention scams, fraud or OTPs. They include a podcast-style “Fraud Files” series with a former police officer, and short alerts such as “Banks will never ask for your OTP”. For a lender, this does something an ad cannot: it shows the brand is on the customer's side.

Presenters, not models

Of the 60 posts we decoded, 19 are talking-head videos and 10 are lifestyle footage. 17 are in Hinglish and 6 in Hindi. A presenter in a Piramal polo hosts explainers such as “Gyaani Squad” (“Personal Loan confusion? Not anymore!”). 49 of the 60 carry no proof such as a statistic or an expert.

Source: Instagram, @piramalfinance, 366 posts from August 2024 to August 2026. Likes are a count of reactions, not of applications.

One post carried a lot

The most-viewed reel, “Kya aap wahi ho? Ruke kyu ho abhi tak” (September 2025), has about 11.0 million views and 576,000 likes. The median post has 335,617 views (of the 266 posts that show views). As in most feeds, a few posts do most of the work.

What the competition is doing

Bajaj Finserv and Tata Capital both have much larger ad libraries and use them differently from each other.

Source: Meta Ad Library and Instagram, India, read August 2026. The post windows differ: Piramal's 366 posts cover 25 months, Bajaj's 208 cover eight, so post totals are not comparable. Follower counts are as scraped.

Bajaj Finserv: a catalogue of offers

Of 40 Bajaj ads we pulled, 30 are an automated product feed. Of its 96 decoded creatives, all 96 are studio-made, 69 show no person, 63 have an app-download button and 47 carry a discount. The big hook is the Insta EMI Card and what to buy with it, such as a phone at EMI from ₹2,288. On Instagram it posts more (6.1 a week) but gets a lower median view count (75,072) than Piramal.

Tata Capital: rates, weddings and targeting

Tata Capital's 44 decoded creatives lead with life events (a wedding loan with EMIs from ₹94 a day) and a rate (“Personal loans with ROIs from 10.99%”). 43 of 44 do not show a product, and none carries a discount. The links in its ads carry campaign names such as “Top_Cities” and “Website_Lookalike”, which suggests it targets by city and by lookalike audience. On Instagram its reels have the highest median views of the three (3.6 million), from the smallest following.

What other brands can take from this

• Use ads as a signpost. Two of Piramal's three ads send people to the profile, where the posts do the persuading.
• Turn a film into reels. Three Neeyat cuts posted on three days drew 15.8 million views.
• Teach what customers fear. In a trust-based category, 34 of 150 posts on scams is a strategy, not filler.
• Put your own people on camera. Presenters in company polos explain loans in Hinglish.
• Do not read a small ad library as a small effort. The work may be on the other side of the click.