PolicyBazaar - Success Story of the Online Aggregator of Insurance Policies

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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.

However, 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. It has been discovered that on several occasions, 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 turned unicorn on June 26, 2018, thereby becoming the second Indian unicorn in 2018. Here's checking out the success story of the leading Indian insurtech company ahead!  

PolicyBazaar - Company Highlights

PolicyBazaar - About
PolicyBazaar - Products
PolicyBazaar - How does it work?
PolicyBazaar - Industry Details
PolicyBazaar - Founders and Team
PolicyBazaar - The Idea and Starting Up
PolicyBazaar - Name, Tagline, and Logo
PolicyBazaar - Mission and Vision
PolicyBazaar - Business Model
PolicyBazaar - Revenue Model
PolicyBazaar - Funding and Investors
PolicyBazaar - Investment
PolicyBazaar - IPO
PolicyBazaar - ESOP
PolicyBazaar - Growth and Revenue
PolicyBazaar - Challenges
PolicyBazaar - Acquistion
PolicyBazaar - Competitors
PolicyBazaar - Business Partners
PolicyBazaar - Awards and Recognition
PolicyBazaar - Future Plans

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 settling claims now.

PolicyBazaar - Products

The main PolicyBazaar products include:

• Policybazaar car insurance
• Policybazaar health insurance
• Policybazaar term insurance
• Policybazaar investment plan
• Policybazaar travel insurance
• Policybazaar 2 wheeler insurance
• Policybazaar family health insurance
• Policybazaar saral jeevan bima
• Policybazaar child savings plan
• Policybazaar guaranteed return plan
• Policybazaar retirement plan
• Policybazaar group health insurance
• Policybazaar 1 cr health insurance
• Policybazaar Helpline Number For Cyclone Biparjoy
• Policybazaar for Business
• Policybazaar AI-enabled WhatsApp bot

PolicyBazaar - How does it work?

PolicyBazaar is the marketplace for all your insurance-related needs. It provides life insurance, health insurance, car 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 PolicyBazaar'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 PolicyBazaar'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 $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.

Yashish Dahiya

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, the founder and ex-CEO 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, while Yashish went to take the responsibility of the CEO of the broader group of PolicyBazaar.

Sarbvir Singh

Sarbvir Singh, the 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.

Alok Bansal

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.

Avaneesh Nirjar

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.

Tarun Mathur

Co-founder and CBO of PolicyBazaar, Tarun Mathur has a BIT from IGNOU, after which he joined HeroITES, worked as a Team Leader in Workforce Management, and a Manager in FE Global Technology before founding PolicyBazaar with the other co-founders in May 2008.

Manoj Sharma

Also known as another Co-founder who works as the Director of Finance with PolicyBazaar, Manoj Sharma is an alumnus of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. After having a brief stint with Ericsson Indian Pvt. Ltd., Sharma joined Fiamm Minda Automotive Pvt. Ltd. He eventually joined some more companies including First Europa, and Anand Nishikawa.

Sharat Dhall

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, 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 Shareholding

The largest owner of the PolicyBazaar shares is Softbank, which holds over 15% of the shares of the Yashish Dahiya and Alok Bansal-founded firm. Makeshift, Infoedge, and Tencent are some of the other major shareholders. The company founder and group CEO Yashish Dahiya also held over 4% of the stocks of PolicyBazaar. Among these, Dahiya opted to sell 37,69,471 equity shares on June 6, 2022. This notification in the BSE filing lead to a sharp crash in the share prices. The PolicyBazaar parent, PB Fintech's shares tanked by more than 13% following the announcement, as of June 7, 2022. The ownership of Yashish Dahiya of PB Fintech has increased over time, and this may be around 5.98% by October 2022, as per the company's fillings.

The shares of Softbank which represented a 2.54 percent stake ownership in the company, were sold in PolicyBazaar parent for an average price of Rs 762.8 per share. The sale was for a total of Rs 871.2 crore as reported on August, 10, 2023.

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 PolicyBazaar. We started PolicyBazaar 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 - Mission and Vision

PolicyBazaar's mission statement on its website says, "Building a safety net for households in India."

The vision of PolicyBazaar is to see, "a healthy and well-protected India."

PolicyBazaar - Business Model

PolicyBazaar.com is an insurance aggregator website, which helps the customers research and compares the features of different insurance policies within a category. It enables them to make informed choices when it comes to policy selection. The PolicyBazaar insurance aggregator business model can be seen operating on the B2C and B2B models.

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

PolicyBazaar 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 a total funding of more than $904.9 million in 15 rounds from 33 investors. In the latest round, the company raised around $104.5 million on October 6, 2023. The company is valued at $7.27+ billion in November 2021.

PolicyBazaar - Investment

Policybazzar has made investments in one company till date.

PolicyBazaar - IPO

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 PolicyBazaar's existing shareholders. The company also said that it 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 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 had failed to lift the investor sentiments in the unlisted space earlier. 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 finally went live on November 1, 2021, and had seen the retail portion 36% subscribed right in the first hour of opening. It closed on November 3, 2021.

PolicyBazaar IPO price was fixed at Rs 940 to Rs 980 per equity share. The PolicyBazaar IPO saw the company shares gain more than 20% over the IPO price. The stocks of India's largest digital insurance provider were listed on the BSE at a 17.35% premium to the issue price of Rs 980. The PolicyBazaar stocks were subscribed by 16.59X. The PolicyBazaar stocks closed at Rs 1203 on the NSE, which was 22.74% higher than its IPO price, which valued the company at $7.27 bn, as of November 16, 2021.

PolicyBazaar - ESOP

The parent company of Policybazaar and Paisabazaar, PB Fintech, has given new options to its workers under its current Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP) 2020 and 2021 as per various report news on August 1, 2023.

According to a stock exchange filing, the business has issued 5,44,929 eligible members stock options at an exercise price of Rs 2 under the PB Fintech Employees Stock Option Scheme 2020 and 2021. The value of the new ESOPs awarded by PB Fintech was estimated by Fintrackr to be roughly Rs 40 crore based on the current stock price of the company.

PolicyBazaar - Growth and Revenue

PolicyBazaar is the largest insurance aggregator in India. PolicyBazaar boasts of a 100 million visitors run rate annually and has witnessed a record sale of more than 3,00,000 transactions a month. Here's a list of the growth highlights of PolicyBazaar:

• Over 15,000 policies were sold in a month.
• In the fiscal year 2017-2018, the company recorded 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 occupied around 50% market share in the online insurance space, which later was increased to 93.4% market share in April 2022
• It claims to hold 25% of India's life insurance cover and around 7% of India's retail health insurance business.
• Policybazaar car insurance India claims to have already insured 51+ lakh vehicles, which has over 20 insurers to choose from
• Policybazaar health insurance counts 7 lakh+ happy customers

DocPrime

In August 2018, PolicyBazaar launched DocPrime, an online medical service provider platform. DocPrime helps users in getting real-time consultations 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.

Financials

Policybazaar financials has increased from Rs 1,425 crore in FY22 to Rs 2,558 crore in FY23. Coming to company profit/loss losses increased from Rs 833 in FY22 to Rs 488 crore in FY23.

Policybazaar Expenses Breakdown

Company total expenses rises from Rs 2,384 crore in FY22 to Rs 3,304 crore in FY23.

Below are the expenses details:

EBITDA

The financial performance of Policybazaar increased dramatically between FY22 and FY23, and its EBITDA margin decreased from -50.10% in FY22 to -14.30% in FY23. Cost effectiveness, which saw a drop in expenses per unit of operational revenue, and a rise in ROCE from -14.69% in FY22 to -8.18% in FY23 both contributed to this increase. Overall, these trends point to a significant financial turnaround for the business.

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PolicyBazaar - Challenges

According to PolicyBazaar 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 in January-March.

Policybazaar Systems Hacked

Policybazaar systems were hacked and the insurtech major revealed that it identified some vulnerabilities for Policybazaar Insurance Brokers (“Policybazaar’’) IT systems and more, which were "subject to illegal and unauthorized access." However, it added that these attacks didn't compromise significant customer data, as per reports dated July 25, 2022. Besides, Policybazaar also added that the vulnerabilities that it identified were sorted out, and it has also sanctioned an audit to clearly identify the damage done. The company also mentioned that it has already reached out to appropriate authorities in relation to the attack.  

PolicyBazaar - Acquistion

PolicyBazaar has acquired Visit Internet Services on January 15, 2022.

PolicyBazaar - Competitors

PolicyBazaar's major competitors are:

• BankBazaar
• CoverFox
• EasyPolicy
• CreditMantri
• PolicyAdvisor
• Acko
• 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 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.

In order to satisfy clients' dual needs of financial security and wealth creation, Bharti AXA Life Insurance partners with PolicyBazaar on September 23, 2023 to develop Wealth Maximizer, an industry-first ULIP plan.

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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
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PolicyBazaar - Future Plans

PolicyBazaar future plans include standing to its market leadership among the other insurtech companies. It looks to further increase the underwriting premium, expand its unique customer base, increase revenue, look towards profitability, innovate new products and technology for better customer satisfaction, and expand successfully outside India in the upcoming years.

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 PolicyBazaar's valuation?

PolicyBazaar is currently valued at $7.27 billion, as of November 2021.

Who is the CEO of PolicyBazaar?

Sarbvir Singh is the CEO of Policybazaar.

How much is PolicyBazaar's revenue?

The company has recorded its revenues at Rs 957 crore in FY21.

Who are the top competitors of PolicyBazaar?

The top 10 competitors in PolicyBazaar's competitive set are:

• BankBazaar
• Coverfox
• Easypolicy
• Acko
• Turtlemint
• ETInsure
• Greenlife Insurance
• CreditMantri
• FundsIndia
• ApnaLoanBazaar

What is the Policybazaar car insurance India?

Policybazaar offers car insurance in India, which is designed as a mandatory policy that covers the cost of damages caused to cars in case of unpredictable events like theft, collision and more. The Policybazaar car insurance India has over 20 car insurers to choose from and has already insured over 51 lakh vehicles.  

How is Policybazaar health insurance?

The Policybazaar health insurance is an insurance plan of PolicyBazaar that acts as a contract between the insurance company and the insurer for a premium amount, which covers the medical expenses associated with the hospitalisation, surgeries, daycare visits, and more. Such healthcare insurance will either reimburse the medical costs or offer cashless treatments.  

What does the travel insurance of Policybazaar offer?

The travel insurance of Policybazaar protects the users from any unexpected losses while travelling in domestic or internationally. The basic plans of the PolicyBazaar travel insurance covers the medical expenses, while there are other comprehensive plans that also cover for flight delays, luggage lost, personal liability, cancellation of trips, and more.