It’s always good to be insured against the contingencies and emergencies of life. The whole idea behind an insurance policy is to financially equip us to deal with losses. Having insurance brings many benefits like managing risk and cash flow uncertainty. It is also regarded as a good investment tool.
However, the agents who sell insurance fail to provide insurance that meets the customer's needs in most of the cases. They knowingly or unknowingly hide crucial policy-related information from the customers. Several times, these agents sell policies focusing on their benefit and commission rather than the customer's requirements. Thanks to the opacity of the insurance industry, a big chunk of the saver’s funds goes into fattening the agent’s wallet. Due to these factors, customers hesitate to buy insurance from agents.
Yashish Dahiya founded PolicyBazaar, India's largest platform for analyzing, comparing, and buying insurance based on price, quality, and other key features, in 2008 to solve this problem.
PolicyBazaar - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | PolicyBazaar |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Gurugram |
| Founder | Yashish Dahiya, Alok Bansal, and Avaneesh Nirjar |
| Sector | Fintech |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Parent Organization | EtechAces Marketing and Consulting |
| Website | policybazaar.com |
About PolicyBazaar
What is PolicyBazaar
PolicyBazaar - Industry Details
PolicyBazaar - Founders and Team
PolicyBazaar - The Idea and Starting Up
PolicyBazaar - Name, Tagline and Logo
PolicyBazaar - Business Model and How it Works
PolicyBazaar - Revenue Model
PolicyBazaar - Funding and Investors
PolicyBazaar - Revenue/Annual Turnover & Valuation
PolicyBazaar - Challenges
PolicyBazaar - Competitors
PolicyBazaar - Business Partners
PolicyBazaar - Achievements
PolicyBazaar - Awards & Recognition
PolicyBazaar - Future Plans
Check out this list of 20 Best Fintech Startups in India
About PolicyBazaar
PolicyBazaar is India’s leading aggregator and marketplace of insurance products. Established in 2008, the company initially compared the prices of insurance policies and provided insurance-related information but now it not only assists customers in buying insurance policies but also provides assistance for cancellation/renewal of policies and even claim settlements.
What is PolicyBazaar
PolicyBazaar is the marketplace for all your insurance needs. It provides life insurance, health insurance, motor insurance, travel insurance, group insurance, etc. The company offers more than 250 insurance plans and around 50 insurance brands on its platform. The platform is designed such that the visitors can easily compare the insurance plans and buy plans as per personal insurance needs.
The company is constantly adding new features and technology to make the customer experience smoother. The company introduced 'my account' feature some time back. Through PolicyBazaar 'My Account' feature, customers can easily download a policy, raise a ticket, ask for clarification, and upgrade policies. The company introduced a self-inspection video feature for the revival of lapsed motor insurance.
They also adopted Amazon Polly and developed an in-house AI chatbot - PBee to improve customer satisfaction.
In 2015, their app was launched. The app is available for both Android and iOS platforms. A customer can not only search, compare and buy insurance through the PolicyBazaar app, but also take advantage of interesting features like hospital locator, garage locator, insurance premium calculator, instant renewal of insurance policies, claim assistance, and more.
PolicyBazaar - Industry Details
According to NASSCOM, the Fintech market in India is likely to touch US$ 2.4 billion by 2021.
The insurance industry in India is likely to touch US$ 280 billion marks by 2021. However, a huge chunk of the Indian population does not have insurance of any kind. Overall insurance penetration i.e. premium as a percentage of GDP was only 3.69% in 2017. As such, there is still a huge under-served market for insurance in India.
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PolicyBazaar - Founders and Team
Yashish Dahiya, Alok Bansal and Avaneesh Nirjar founded PolicyBazaar in June 2008.
PolicyBazaar founder Yashish Dahiya holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from IIT Delhi (1994), a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from IIM Ahmedabad (1996), and an MBA from INSEAD (2001). Just after that, he joined Bain&Co as a consultant. He then became the managing director (UK) at ebookers.com. In 2005, he founded First Europa, a Global Online Insurance Broker where he was responsible for leading its global expansion and managing the business of the company across 9 geographical locations. He is also a national-level swimmer and triathlete.
Yashish Dahiya, founder of policybazaar, is also an investor and founder of paisabazaar.com which provides fixed deposits and loans at your fingertips.
Yashish served as the CEO of PolicyBazaar from its inception until February 2020. In February 2020, Sarbvir Singh was appointed as the CEO of PolicyBazaar.
Sarbvir Singh, PolicyBazaar CEO, served as the Managing Partner at WaterBridge Ventures before joining the company. An alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad, Sarbvir has a rich experience of working with companies like Emerson Electric, Citi Bank, HomeShop 18, Network 18, and JP Morgan Private Equity Group. He also co-founded Hercules Capital, a company investing institutional and private client assets in the Indian equity market. Sarbvir left Hercules Capital in 2006.
PolicyBazaar co-founder and Director Alok Bansal is an alumnus of IIM Kolkata. Before PolicyBazaar, he worked as finance director at First Europa, senior Manager - Corp Strategy at Mahindra & Mahindra and business manager at iGate Global Solutions.
PolicyBazaar co-founder Avaneesh Nirjar is an Alumni of IIT Kharagpur. He holds an MBA from Birla Institute of Technology. Before PolicyBazaar, he worked with companies like Marico Industries, AT&T India, GE Capital International Services, Heroites, Cendant ISO, and First Europa.
Sharat Dhall is the COO of PolicyBazaar. Before joining PolicyBazaar, Sharat was the COO at Yatra Online Pvt. Ltd. He has vast experience, having worked as the Business Head at Hindustan Liver Limited, Vice President - e-commerce at Indiatimes.com, Managing Director (India) at Expedia, and Managing Director (India) at TripAdvisor. He is also Advisory Board Member at CreditEnable, a global credit insights and technology solutions company
As per LinkedIn data, the team consists of around 5,000 employees. As confirmed by PolicyBazaar owner Yashish Dahiya in 2019, PolicyBazaar had plans to create 2,500 new vacancies, leading to a team strength of 6,000 employees. The recruitment will be done majorly for the customer support function of the company.
PolicyBazaar - The Idea and Starting Up
The idea for starting up has its seed sowed in an incident of insurance mis-selling that Yashish Dahiya once faced.
"I was going through some of the financials with my father and few things looked dubious. On deeper inspection, my father had been cheated of a few lakh rupees by insurance agents. The transactions looked clean on the face of it but the reality emerged when I looked in closely. This got me thinking about how people are getting duped hence came into being PolicyBazaar. We started PolicyBazaar with just 14 hardworking individuals", said Yashish Dahiya, founder and owner of Policy bazaar.
PolicyBazaar - Name, Tagline and Logo
As the platform is a marketplace for Policy, it is aptly named PolicyBazaar.
The company's punch line/tagline is, "Insurance Compare Kiya?". The unique comparative system boosts credibility by empowering customers with the latest and most accurate information.
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PolicyBazaar - Business Model and How it Works
PolicyBazaar.com is an aggregator website which helps customers research and compare the features of different insurance policies within a category. Hence, it enables them to make an informed choice.
The company has tied up with insurance brokers to procure information such as price, benefit, insurance cover, etc. directly from the insurers for the customers to compare. Based on the information provided, the customer then chooses the best option. It doesn't charge customers anything for this service.
PolicyBazaar - Revenue Model
PolicyBazaar makes money by leads generation for the insurers, advertising, and policy sales. Till 2011, 85% of it's revenue came from lead generation and advertising while the rest 15% came from policy sales. Now, 85% of the revenue comes from e-commerce or policy sales.
PolicyBazaar - Funding & Investors
PolicyBazaar has raised a total funding of more than $496.6M in 7 rounds from 12 investors. In November 2019, the company raised $150 million funding from Tencent Holdings.
| Date | Stage | Funding Amount | Investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2011 | Venture Round | Undisclosed | Intel Capital |
| March 2013 | Series A | $4.6 Million | Intel Capital and Inventus Capital Partners |
| April 2013 | Series B | $5 Million | Inventus Capital Partners, Info Edge, and Intel Capital. |
| May 2014 | Series C | $20 Million | Tiger Global Management |
| April 2015 | Series D | $40 Million | PremjiInvest, Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital, Steadview Capital, ABG Capital. |
| October 2017 | Series E | $77 Million | Temasek, Tiger Global Management,Premji Invest,Info Edge(India) Ltd and other undisclosed investors |
| May 2018 | Series F | $200 Million | Softbank and InfoEdge(India) |
| Nov 2019 | Series G | $150 Million | Tencent Holdings |
PolicyBazaar - Revenue/ Annual Turnover/ Valuation & Net Worth
In the fiscal year 2017-2018, PolicyBazaar's turnover increased by 225% to reach INR 159.4 Cr against 49.1 Cr in 2016-2017. As confirmed by Yashish Dahiya, the company is aiming to earn revenue of Rs 10,000 Cr by Fiscal Year 2020.
After the latest round of funding worth $150 million raised from Tencent Holdings, PolicyBazaar's valuation now stands at over $1 billion.
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PolicyBazaar - Challenges
According to PolicyBazaar Marketing Head Sai Narayan, customer inertia is one of the biggest challenges faced. People are still habituated to buy insurance from insurance agents. It takes effort to convince this category of people to buy insurance online.
According to Narayan, the other challenge is that in India most people view insurance just as a tax saving tool. They fail to see the bigger picture that insurance means much more than just tax saving. As such, most insurance sales happen during January - March.
PolicyBazaar - Competitors
BankBazaar, CoverFox, EasyPolicy, PolicyAdvisor, Acko and InsurancePandit are some major competitors of PolicyBazaar.
PolicyBazaar - Business Partners
The startup has reputed companies from car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, corporate insurance, and the travel insurance sectors as its business partners.
Aegon Life, Aviva Life Insurance, Bajaj Allianz, Cigna, Edelweiss Tokio Life, HDFC Ergo, DHFL Pramerica Life Insurance, HDFC Life, ICICI Prudential, Liberty General Insurance, Cholamandalam General Insurance, PNB Metlife, Max Life, Royal Sundaram General Insurance, SBI Life Insurance, TATA AIG, Future Generali, IFFCO-TOKIO General Insurance, Apollo Munich Health Insurance, Religare Health Insurance, Start Health, and Allied Insurance, and IDBI Federal Life Insurance are some of the partners of PolicyBazaar.
Some other partners include Reliance Life Insurance, Aditya Birla Capital, TATA AIA Life, Shriram Life/ General Insurance, Bharti AXA, National Insurance, New India Assurance, Universal Sompo General Insurance, Reliance General Insurance, Bajaj Allianz, Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance, Max Bupa, Oriental insurance, Raheja QBE, SBI General Insurance, and United India Insurance.
PolicyBazaar - Achievements
Following are some major achievements of PolicyBazaar:
- It is known as the largest insurance aggregator in India.
- The platform receives 100 million visitors annually.
- Sale of nearly 3,00,000 transactions a month.
- Over 15,000 policies sold in a month.
- In the fiscal year 2017-2018, the company scored a growth of 225% in its revenues.
- After raising $200 Million from SoftBank and Info Edge in May 2018, PolicyBazaar's valuation reached over $1 billion. Thus, the company became the second Fintech Company in India to enter the unicorn club after Paytm.
- It occupies 50%market shares in online insurance space.
- It claims to hold 25% of India's life insurance cover and around 7% of India's retail health insurance business.
- In August 2018, PolicyBazaar launched DocPrime, an online medical service provider platform. DocPrime helps users in getting real-time consultation from doctors online through chat and call. The platform has become quite popular and within six months of operations, DocPrime's website received 1 million unique visitors.
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PolicyBazaar - Awards & Recognition
The company has received many awards and recognition for its business model, customer centricity, and marketing efforts. It has won the following awards:
- IAMAI Indian Digital Awards for the best financial website - 2013-2014
- Frost and Sullivan Customer Value Leadership Award - 2014
- Award for Best Mobile App Consumer Finance by GSF Mobile Appies - 2015
- Exchange4media Golden Mikes Award - 2015
- DMAi Asia ECHO Awards - 2015
- CMO Asia Awards - 2015
- BAM Award - 2015
- Iconic IDC Insight Awards - 2015
PolicyBazaar - Future Plans
Major future plans of PolicyBazaar include:
- Underwriting premium worth Rs 10,000 crore by 2020.
- Expanding its unique customer base to 1 crore by 2020.
- Increasing revenue to Rs 1500 crore by 2020.
- Innovating new products and technology for better customer satisfaction.
- Expanding outside India.
- PolicyBazaar is also expected to launch its IPO soon.
Link : https://startuptalky.com/startup-story-policy-bazaar/
Author :- Shubham Kumar
June 08, 2020 at 11:30AM
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