Policybazaar is an Indian online life insurance and general insurance comparison portal.
Yashish Dahiya was a former MD for Ebookers, one of the largest travel portals in Europe; Avaneesh Nirjar had 20 years of experience in outsourcing industry and has held leadership level positions in Hero ITES, GE Capital; Alok Bansal had worked at Mahindra & Mahindra, Strategy Management. Dahiya set up Policybazaar with Avaneesh Nirjar and Alok Bansal – all three first generation entrepreneurs – to makeinsurance purchase easy in the country. When Yashish set up ebookers Plc, a travel business which employed 2,000 people across 13 countries in Europe, it was almost an entrepreneurial project for him.
PolicyBazaar.com is an insurance research engine, which allows intelligent insurance decisions. Insurance is a very complicated category; most consumers have never understood the product and typically insurance is never bought but is sold to the consumer. The website enables a consumer to research and evaluate products, and select the best product for his/her needs. It empowers the customer to compare insurances from many companies and make intelligent purchase. The website enables a consumer to research and evaluate products, and select the best product for his/her needs. As market grows, Policybazaar add on personal loans, credit cards and home loans.
The trigger to set up the insurance portal was the low penetration, which in turn throws up significant opportunities. Also, the profit margins in setting up an insurance portal are quite high as more people are now looking to buy risk cover at discounted rates. Typically discounts for customers are drawn from lower processing costs. Online automated loan and insurance processing is 70% cheaper than selling through a physical bank branch – these cost savings are shared with the customer Policybazaar which offers a comparison of various insurance policies based on price, quality and key benefits was Policybazaar.com started its operations on June 4, 2008 by their founders own investment. The objective of the company since inception has been to empower customers to take the decision of buying even a complex financial offering like insurance in their own hands.
Though the number of people transacting online had increased considerably thanks to e-ticketing, the number of people wanting to buy an insurance policy online was miserably low. People were only logging online to gain more information about their policies or new policies. To remove this, PolicyBazaar had to build an environment of trust, in which the user could trust the gateway as being safe and at the same time feel secure while transacting with PolicyBazaar.
As the company grew, it attracted VC funding which came in from InfoEdge—Naukri.com and Intel Capital.
