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It’s recommended to be insured against the contingencies and emergencies of life. The whole idea behind an insurance policy is to financially cope with unforeseen losses. Being insured helps manage risk and cash flow uncertainty. It is also regarded as a good investment channel.
But the agents who sell insurance fail to provide options that cover customers completely. They knowingly or unknowingly hide crucial policy-related information from gullible individuals. Several times, these agents sell irrelevant policies just for their benefit and commission rather than prioritizing 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 bring transparency and accountability in the Indian insurance policy segment.
PolicyBazaar - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | PolicyBazaar |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Gurugram |
| Founder | Yashish Dahiya, Alok Bansal, and Avaneesh Nirjar |
| Sector | Fintech |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Parent Organization | EtechAces Marketing and Consulting |
| Website | policybazaar.com |
PolicyBazaar - Latest News
October 27, 2021 - PolicyBazaar's parent, P.B Fintech is planning to launch its IPO on November 1, 2021, at the price band of INR 940-INR 980 per share and will end on November 3, 2021.
PolicyBazaar - About
PolicyBazaar - What is it and how it works?
PolicyBazaar - Industry Details
PolicyBazaar - Founders and Team
PolicyBazaar - The Idea and Starting Up
PolicyBazaar - Name, Tagline, and Logo
PolicyBazaar - Business Model and Functioning
PolicyBazaar - Revenue Model
PolicyBazaar - Funding and Investors
PolicyBazaar - Revenue/Valuation
PolicyBazaar - Challenges
PolicyBazaar - Competitors
PolicyBazaar - Business Partners
PolicyBazaar - Achievements
PolicyBazaar - Awards and Recognition
PolicyBazaar - Future Plans
PolicyBazaar - FAQS
PolicyBazaar - About
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. The company saw rapid growth and has further expanded on many horizons. Along with being an insurance marketplace, the company further extends assistance for the cancellation/renewal of policies and settle claims now.
PolicyBazaar - What is it and how it works?
PolicyBazaar is the marketplace for all your insurance-related 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 in such a way that the visitors can easily compare insurance plans and buy the ones relevant to their needs.
The company constantly adds new features and technology to smoothen the customer experiences. It introduced a 'My Account' feature some time back for the same reason. Through Policy Bazaar's 'My Account' feature, customers can easily download a policy, raise a ticket, ask for clarification, and upgrade policies. PolicyBazaar also introduced a self-inspection video feature for the revival of lapsed motor insurance.
PolicyBazaar also adopted Amazon Polly and developed PBee, an in-house AI chatbot, to improve customer satisfaction.
PolicyBazaar launched its mobile app in 2015. The app is available for both Android and iOS platforms. Customers can not just search, compare, and buy insurance through the Policy Bazaar's app but also take advantage of interesting features such as 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 mark by 2021. However, a huge chunk of the Indian population does not own any kind of insurance. Overall insurance penetration, i.e., premium as a percentage of GDP, was only 3.69% in 2017. As such, there still exists 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 & Company 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 an investor and the founder of paisabazaar.com as well. PaisaBazaar 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 PolicyBazaar. 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 held the positions of 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 for 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 was the Business Head at Hindustan Liver Limited, Vice President of 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 PolicyBazaar team consists of around 5,000 employees. As confirmed by PolicyBazaar owner Yashish Dahiya in 2019, Policy Bazaar 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 PolicyBazaar 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 Policy Bazaar. We started Policy Bazaar with just 14 hardworking individuals," said Yashish Dahiya, founder and owner of PolicyBazaar.
PolicyBazaar - Name, Tagline, and Logo
As the platform is a marketplace for insurance policies, it is aptly named PolicyBazaar.
The logo of the company depicts the brand name of the company "policybazaar" and has an interesting play on the words. Here the dot com is symbolized with a blue circle inside which is the text "com". The company has also cleverly included the tagline of the company "Compare.Buy.Save" in its logo.
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PolicyBazaar - Business Model and Functioning
Policy Bazaar.com is an aggregator website, which helps the customers research and compare the features of different insurance policies within a category. It enables them to make an informed choice when it comes to policy selection.
The company has tied up with insurance brokers to procure information, such as price, benefit, insurance cover, etc., directly from them for 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
Policy Bazaar makes money by generating leads for insurers, advertising, and policy sales. Till 2011, 85% of its revenue came from lead generation and advertising while the rest 15% came from policy sales. Now 85% of the revenue comes from e-commerce and policy sales.
PolicyBazaar - Funding and Investors
PolicyBazaar has raised total funding of more than $780M in 14 rounds from 22 investors. In the latest round, the company raised around $13.4M (Rs 99.9 crores) from its parent, PB Fintech on October 4, 2021, prior to its upcoming IPO round. This fundraising round came after a 6 months-long gap, when the company last raised $75 million funding from a private equity round in March 2021.
| Date | Stage | Funding Amount | Investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 4, 2021 | - | $13.4 Million | PB Fintech |
| March 17, 2021 | Private Equity Round | $75 Million | Falcon Edge Capital |
| March 3, 2021 | Secondary Market | $45 Million | True North & Angel Investors |
| November 23, 2020 | Secondary Market | $20 Million | True North |
| July 7, 2020 | Secondary Market | $80 Million | Softbank Vision Fund |
| July 7, 2020 | Series H | $50 Million | Softbank Vision Fund |
| Nov 11, 2019 | Series G | $150 Million | Tencent Holdings |
| May 1, 2018 | Series F | $200 Million | Softbank and InfoEdge(India) |
| October 13, 2017 | Series E | $77 Million | Temasek, Tiger Global Management, Premji Invest, Info Edge(India) Ltd and other undisclosed investors |
| April 15, 2015 | Series D | $40 Million | PremjiInvest, Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital, Steadview Capital, ABG Capital. |
| May 26, 2014 | Series C | $20 Million | Tiger Global Management |
| April 2013 | Series B | $5 Million | Inventus Capital Partners, Info Edge, and Intel Capital. |
| March 2013 | Series A | $4.6 Million | Intel Capital and Inventus Capital Partners |
| May 2011 | Venture Round | Undisclosed | Intel Capital |
PolicyBazaar earlier eyed an IPO in the month of August 2021 and had already filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus then with SEBI. According to the filing, the company had reportedly filed to raise around Rs 6017.5 crores. This would include a fresh issue of shares amounting to Rs 3,750 crores. Furthermore, the company would also make an offer for the sale of shares worth Rs 2,267.5 crores by Policy Bazaar's existing shareholders.
The company might also raise up to Rs 750 crores, as per the latest news, before it goes public.
However, the IPO was not materialized in August. The company held a meeting on September 24th with the board of directors, who approved of allotting 20,20,202 equity shares of Policybazaar Insurance Brokers at a premium price of INR 485 to its parent firm PB Fintech Ltd.
Though the initial public offering (IPO) of PB Fintech Ltd., the parent company of PolicyBazaar was approved by the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI), it has failed to lift the investor sentiments in the unlisted space. Therefore, the share price of PolicyBazaar in the unlisted market was also not changed, remaining around Rs 1,700-1,800, as reported on October 19, 2021.
The IPO of PolicyBazaar parent, P.B Fintech is scheduled to go live from November 1, 2021, onwards, ending on November 3.
Jeenal Jain
PolicyBazaar - Revenue/Valuation
PolicyBazaar has reported a quite good, 66% increase in revenue, to $70 Million in FY2020.
After the latest round of funding worth $75 million raised from Falcon edge capital, PolicyBazaar's valuation now stands over $2.4 billion (March 2021).
Vidhi Punamiya
PolicyBazaar - Challenges
According to Policy Bazaar Marketing Head Sai Narayan, customer inertia is one of the biggest challenges. People still have the habit of buying insurance from agents. It takes effort to convince this category of people to buy insurance online.
According to Narayan, the other challenge is that most Indians 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
PolicyBazaar's major competitors are BankBazaar, CoverFox, EasyPolicy, PolicyAdvisor, Acko, and InsurancePandit.
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 Policy Bazaar.
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.
Souvik Dey
PolicyBazaar - Achievements
Following are some major achievements of Policy Bazaar:
- It is 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 share in the 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.
Shubham Kumar
PolicyBazaar - Awards and Recognition
The company has received many awards and has been recognized 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 2021.
- Expanding its unique customer base to 1 crore by 2021.
- Increasing revenue to Rs 1500 crore by 2021.
- Target valuation of $3.5 billion in 2021.
- Innovating new products and technology for better customer satisfaction.
- Expanding outside India.
- PolicyBazaar is also expected to launch its IPO soon.
PolicyBazaar - FAQs
What is PolicyBazaar?
Policybazaar is a one-stop online destination for all types of insurance products. It holds experience and expertise in insurance to help customers choose the best insurance policies.
What is Policy Bazaar's valuation?
In November 2019, Tencent Holdings Ltd. has acquired a minority stake in Policybazaar.com valuing the Indian online insurance aggregator at $1.5 billion.
Who is the CEO of Policy Bazaar?
Sarbvir Singh is the CEO of Policy bazaar.
How much is Policy Bazaar's revenue?
Its revenue from operations almost doubled in the fiscal year March 2019 to reach Rs 310.3 crore from Rs 158.3 crore it earned in FY18.
Who are the top competitors of Policy Bazaar?
The top 10 competitors in PolicyBazaar's competitive set are BankBazaar, Coverfox, Easypolicy, Acko, Turtlemint, ETInsure, Greenlife Insurance, CreditMantri, FundsIndia, and ApnaLoanBazaar.
Author: Shubham Kumar
Source : https://startuptalky.com/startup-story-policy-bazaar/
Date : 2021-10-27T07:03:00.000Z