Policybazaar is India’s largest and leading insurance aggregator website, specialising in providing a comparative analysis of various insurance products based on price, quality, and key benefits. The comparative system empowers customers by providing accurate information on insurance products and solution-driven customer service.
Policybazaar’s deep industry knowledge, service-offering expertise, and technical capabilities, provide consumers with the best solutions for financial security and competitive returns. Policybazaar has been the recipient of many awards for its innovative business model, marketing efforts, and customer-centricity. The company won the 2015 CMO Asia Awards for Best Ecommerce Website of the Year and Best Mobile App, the DMAi Asia Echo Awards 2015 for Effectiveness in Advertising (Insurance), and the Frost & Sullivan Consumer Value Leadership Award 2015, among many others.
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.
The Initial Journey of Yasheesh Dahiya
Entrepreneurship was a matter of choice for Yashish as he opted out of IIMA campus placements to give home tuition as he realized that tuition will pay him more than a routine 9-5 job and that’s how his entrepreneurial journey had started. But after family pressure, as tuition was not seen as work, he started working with Illinois Tools Works as a Business unit head.
In 2002, he went abroad for an MBA from INSEAD and later joined Bain & Co. to work as a Management Consultant. After a stint as a consultant, he joined ebookers, an online travel aggregator where he got an experience that gave him a real taste of entrepreneurship and the power of online marketplaces.
He resumed his entrepreneurial journey and got a taste of the insurance aggregation business as the CEO of First Europa, a global online insurance brokerage firm that undertook business across Europe, the Chinese Mainland, and Hong Kong. There he was responsible for leading the global expansion and managing the business of the company across 9 geographical locations.
One day Yashish was going through some of the financials with his father and a few things looked dubious, so when they dig deep, he found that his father was cheated out of a few lakh rupees by insurance agents. From the outside, the transaction looks clean, but from the inside, the reality came up. So, from this instance, he thought about how these companies crooked people. The experience and learning he had gained from First Europa, led him to co-found the policy bazaar. There was rampant mis-spelling, lack of transparency, and lack of information for the consumer.
Everyone loves simplicity and the idea of Policybazar is quite simple. Back in 2008, there were about 12 to 15 general insurance companies and another 15 life insurance companies. There were about 150 to 200 insurance products for a consumer to choose from. How do you choose the right product? All we did was create a comparison or a chart. We simplified the fine prints and made it easy for the customers to understand.
Policy Bazaar Founders
Yashish Dahiya holds a B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from IIM Ahmedabad (1996) and an MBA from INSEAD. Soon after, he joined Bain and Company as a consultant. Following this stint, he became the managing director at ebookers.com. Then, Dahiya became the co-founder of PolicyBazaar and served as its CEO till February 2020.
Co-founder Alok Bansal is a post-graduate from IIM Kolkata. He has held 3 major positions prior to arriving at Policy Bazaar. First, he served as the finance director at First Europa, followed by a stint as the senior Manager – Corp Strategy at Mahindra and Mahindra and business manager at iGate Global Solutions.
The third co-founder, Avaneesh Nirjar, too, is an IIT alumnus. Furthermore, he holds an MBA degree from the Birla Institute of Technology. He has worked for a number of notable companies so far including GE Capital International Services, Cendant ISO, First Europa, AT&T India, Marico Industries and Heroites.
PolicyBazaar Inception
Policybazaar started as an insurance comparison website to provide Indian insurance buyers with an online platform to compare and buy a policy plan. Earlier, the insurance sector in India lacked transparency, and policies were mostly sold through agents, but they had changed that by listing the details of multiple insurance policies for customers to choose from. They had started with a price-comparison website and an information portal for learning about insurance and insurance programs.
After the initial success, they had expanded to become a marketplace for insurance policies. Interestingly, Policy Bazaar had only 14 employees at the time of its launch. The team has now grown to over 6,000 employees. In the initial days, it was only a policy comparison website; however, now you cannot just compare but also buy all kinds of insurance (vehicle, life, travel, etc.) from the website itself and even make secure investments with just a few clicks.
Challenges
Policybazaar required a high-level security solution for the applications they migrated to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Security in a cloud environment is a shared responsibility between the public cloud services provider and the customer, so Policybazaar required a robust cloud security solution that offered protection from data breaches and business disruptions.
Policybazaar also wanted better visibility across the organisation’s threat landscape, including the ability to identify and stop malicious activity at the endpoints. This led the company to seek a solution that would provide network-wide visibility, insight, and control against targeted attacks.
“Implementation of Trend Micro’s solutions resulted in Policybazaar gaining a complete and proactive security solution. Deep Security improved protection and enhanced visibility on the hybrid cloud, strengthening our security posture.”Bibhu Krishna, VP IT Infrastructure and Security, Policybazaar
Policy Bazaar Achievements and Recognition
⮚ It is the largest insurance aggregator in India.
⮚ Policy Bazaar gets more than 100 million visitors every year
⮚ The portal sells more than 20,000 policies every month
⮚ The company recorded a whopping 220% increase in its revenue in FY 2017-2018
⮚ Policy Bazaar is the second Indian company to enter the Unicorn club, after Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm. The insurance website achieved these feet in May 2018 when the company received $200 million from Softbank and InfoEdge (India).
⮚ If stats released by Policy Bazaar are to be believed, the company holds 25% of India’s life insurance cover and roughly 7% of India’s retail health insurance business.
Conclusion
The concept of buying different types of insurance online is still alien to many Indians. Only the educated youth residing in developed cities are contributing majorly to the revenue generated through online policy sales. Every new concept takes time for people to get used to. Online insurance is no exception. With the rate at which digital reach is growing, the offline modes of buying things will slowly disappear.
Policy Bazaar has done most of the things right, from the beginning, and that’s why they are dominating the policy market in times of COVID-19 health crisis, wherein everyone wants to secure the future of their loved ones, just in case they fall victim to the wrath of the virus. On the marketing front though, Policy Bazaar has left no stone unturned and that is indeed evident from their success.
