Mint BFSI Awards 2023: A stellar jury picks the finest

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Crisil Ltd; and Nithya Easwaran, managing director, Multiples Alternate Asset Management Pvt. Ltd. Mint’s knowledge partners in this exercise were howindialives.com and Fisdom.

Mint presented before the jury the mathematics and rankings in all categories based on public data. The jury then brought in the qualitative and market intelligence aspects into the conversation to pick winners in each category. Lasting for nearly two hours on a Saturday afternoon in December, the closed-door meeting saw the jury intensely deliberate before deciding on the winners.

Some members recused themselves in certain segments to avoid conflict of interest. Moreover, just because the data ranked someone at the top did not mean the jury had to settle for it as the winner. In a few categories, the jury decided to pick the second or even the third-ranked (by data) as they believed it to be qualitatively ahead.

In fact, the jury chose the number four as the winner in one category. Neither Mint nor our knowledge partners had any say in the selection of the winners. The categories were: large bank; mid-sized bank; small bank; small finance bank; large non-banking financial company (NBFC); mid-sized NBFC; small NBFC; large life insurer; mid-sized life insurer; large non-life insurer; mid-sized non-life insurer; standalone health insurer; actively managed equity mutual fund (MF); and actively managed fixed income MF.

The jury unanimously decided to drop three categories. One and two being best fintechs in online payments and in digital lending, owing to the paucity of available data and information. And three, a fund house based on innovation, where the jury believed that the absolute returns of schemes in contention should cross a certain