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Jitin Diwan on why trust, subscriptions and disciplined capital allocation matter more than chasing rapid transformation
India’s B2B commerce market is large by most measures but gradual by most timelines. For the CFO of a business built around that market, the challenge is less about chasing growth and more about sustaining the financial discipline to outlast the wait.
Jitin Diwan, Chief Financial Officer, IndiaMART InterMESH, has navigated that tension across a career spanning four distinct industries. In this interview, he reflects on what cross-sector experience brings to a finance role, how a subscription-led business responds to macro uncertainty, and where IndiaMART is placing its bets on technology, acquisitions and long-term value creation.
You have moved from telecom to ecommerce to fintech to a B2B marketplace — each sector with a completely different financial rhythm. Most finance professionals build depth in one domain. You chose breadth. Was that a deliberate strategy, or did opportunity pull you along?
Looking back, I do not think I consciously set out to build a career across telecom, ecommerce, fintech and B2B marketplaces. The common thread in every move was the opportunity to learn, solve new business problems and take on larger responsibilities. Telecom taught me scale and operational discipline, Amazon exposed me to a customer-first and data-driven culture with a high level of ownership, and Upstox brought the bias for action and pace of a high-growth fintech. Together, these experiences provided me with a diverse toolkit that I can now leverage at IndiaMART to help drive growth, profitability, governance and long-term value creation at a leadership level.
What I have realised is that while the industries were very different, the core finance challenges were remarkably similar, such as allocating capital wisely, balancing growth with profitability, managing risk and creating long-term value. The breadth came as a result of following interesting opportunities rather than a predefined strategy, but in hindsight, it has helped me develop a broader perspective and bring ideas from one industry into another. That cross-industry lens has probably become one of my biggest strengths as a finance leader.
The B2B commerce opportunity in India is often described as underpenetrated and inevitable. But inevitable can take a very long time. How do you plan financially for a market that is structurally large but behaviourally slow-moving?
The B2B commerce opportunity in India is undoubtedly large, and the pace of adoption is very different from consumer internet businesses. In B2B, decisions are influenced by trust, relationships, business continuity and working-capital considerations. That is why we do not plan our business around the assumption that the market will transform overnight. Instead, we focus on strengthening the fundamentals that drive long-term adoption — helping buyers discover the right suppliers, improving lead quality, enhancing transparency through trust signals and verification, and making the platform increasingly valuable for businesses.
From a financial planning perspective, the key is balancing ambition with patience. Our subscription-led model provides resilience and visibility, allowing us to invest consistently through market cycles. At the same time, we are building a broader B2B ecosystem around the core marketplace — accounting and billing solutions through BUSY, enabling access to credit, leveraging AI to improve discovery and matchmaking, and strengthening trust and verification across the platform. Each initiative is designed to solve a real business problem for MSMEs. Sustainable growth in B2B commerce comes not from changing behaviour overnight, but from earning trust over time and becoming an increasingly integral part of how businesses operate, buy, sell and grow.
The rupee has been under pressure, private capex is cautious, and global uncertainty is compressing planning horizons. How does a CFO of a domestically focused platform business actually respond to macro headwinds — or do you largely insulate yourself from them?
No business is fully insulated from macro conditions, but I would not say we spend our time trying to predict every external variable. While IndiaMART is largely a domestic, subscription-led business and therefore less exposed to currency fluctuations or global trade cycles than many companies, we are closely connected to the health of Indian businesses. When sentiment becomes cautious, MSMEs tend to defer investments, slow expansion plans or become more selective in their spending. As a result, we pay close attention to what our customers are telling us through their behaviour on the platform.
Our response is to stay disciplined and focused on what we can control — maintaining strong customer retention and collections, managing costs prudently, and continuing to invest in areas that create long-term value for our customers. Macro conditions will come and go, but businesses will always need customers, suppliers and trusted partners to grow.
Subscription-based revenue gives a marketplace predictability that transaction-based models do not. How does that shape your capital allocation thinking differently from how you thought about money across different sectors?
We are a cash-generating business with no reliance on external funding. Thus, it puts us in a strong position to explore investments and external initiatives that align with our vision of making business easy. Our capital allocation framework has the following key pillars:
Focus on inorganic growth: Our vision is to create a one-stop platform for MSMEs. Anything at the intersection of MSMEs, B2B and the internet is of relevance. We start small and, as conviction builds, we double down on investments while ensuring investee companies are not burning cash. Over the past two years, we have participated in follow-on investment rounds across the majority of our portfolio, including Fleetx, Bizom, IDfy, SuperProcure, Vyapar and EasyEcom.
AI and tech-led investment: With the evolving technology and AI landscape, investments in the latest technologies remain imperative. This helps us enable our customers with all the tools required to grow with us. A lot of capital in technology and AI is currently innovation-led and investment-oriented. Over the next few months, these investments will help us improve customer experience, enhance efficiency and eventually reduce costs.
IndiaMART’s balance sheet has strengthened steadily over the years, with rising investments and consolidated assets. What key factors have driven this sustained improvement?
Our business model, where the entire collection is received in advance through yearly and multi-year subscriptions, generates significant cash flow from operations and provides clear visibility into future revenues.
Beyond the model itself, three principles have reinforced balance-sheet health.
Product-market fit: As the macro environment evolves, customer expectations evolve too. We focus on customer acquisition cost (CAC) versus lifetime value (LTV) analysis to maintain healthy unit economics. New customer acquisition carries upfront costs, but if the customer does not stay, it becomes a loss at the unit level. Better retention and return on investment (ROI) delivery drive upgrades to premium tiers.
Frugality: Our approach is to do more with less — renegotiating contracts, benchmarking IT services, and deciding carefully between build versus borrow. On the people side, we benchmark manpower based on performance, tenure and span analysis, focusing on retention and internal upskilling rather than constant rehiring.
Long-term orientation: We started integrating AI into operations and workforce upskilling well before it became mainstream, which has allowed our technology investments to maintain a steady, deliberate pace.
What principles guide your approach to balancing shareholder returns with capital retention for future growth?
We do not believe in prioritising one over the other, but rather in being strongly disciplined about both. Every distribution reflects our confidence that rewarding shareholders will not compromise upcoming opportunities. Our recent payout of Rs 360 crore to shareholders (subject to shareholder approval) is a reflection of our financial strength, our belief in the business model and the discipline that has led us here.
Secondly, on capital retention, we remain cautious about what we hold back and ensure sufficient liquidity to cover customer advances while remaining ready for any inorganic growth opportunity. I believe knowing when to return capital is just as important as knowing when to deploy it, and this principle applies both ways.
Online Coverage: BW CFO