POLICYBAZAAR

( Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

MBA )

Submitted By Under the guidance of

Name of Student – Garima Singh Name of the Faculty – Dr. Mohd. Mehdi

Father's Name – Brajesh Prasad Singh

Batch of 2020-22

LLOYD INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT & TECHNOLOGY

PLOT NO 11, KNOWLEDGE PARK-2, GREATER NOIDA-201306 (UP)

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It is my esteemed pleasure to present the project and I whole heartedly thank each
and everyone who helped me in completing the task.

I would like to express my gratitude towards our Director

Dr. Bhupender Kumar Som.

I take chance to express my sincere gratitude and regards to my Internal Guide

Dr. Mohd. Mehdi for his constant inspiration, supervision and invaluable guidance
during the study.

I would like to extend my hearty thanks to entire faculty members of LIMT for
their constant cooperation and support and my parents for their support and
blessings.

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 CONTENTS

S No. Description Page No.

I Acknowledgement

1. Introduction 04-08
2. Challenges faced by PolicyBazaar 09-10
3. Scope of Innovation 11-12
4. Financial and Operating Feasibility 13-15
5. Service Description 16-17
6. USP 18
7. Other Information 19-25
8. References 26

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 INTRODUCTION

Back in 2008, insurance customers in India were facing a tough time. There was lack of
information on products, transparency was missing, mis-selling was rampant, there was a high
lapse rate of insurance policies and consumers felt a general apathy towards the insurance
industry. Insurance companies made profits from policy surrender charges and the entire industry
was mired in murkiness.

That is when a small bunch of people, with no insurance experience, started re-imagining what
the insurance space could be. They imagined a place where consumers could find completely
transparent insurance information, and an option to research and compare insurance products so
they could buy what they really wanted to. It is a place that provided a common service layer for
all consumer services and claims.

With this grand ambition as their life goal, this motley crew of people started their journey into
what is now Policybazaar.com.

Policybazaar.com is now India’s foremost insurance aggregator and a leading fintech player
globally. The objective is the same even today -- Customer First and Sustained
Profitability for the entire insurance ecosystem.

It's a fine balancing act when eight million insurance buyers and 40+ insurers transact a few Lac.
Crores of insurance cover and a few thousand crores of insurance premium on a platform with
complete confidence every year.

MISSION - Building a safety net for 250 million plus households in India.

VISION - A healthy and well-protected India

VALUES - Fairness to all our stakeholders

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 TAGLINE

INSURANCE COMPARE KIYA?

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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 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 such that visitors can easily compare insurance plans and buy the ones relevant to their
needs.

The company constantly adds new features and technology to smoothen customer experience.
The company introduced a ‘My Account’ feature some time back. Through PolicyBazaar’s ‘My
Account’ feature, customers can easily download a policy, raise a ticket, ask for clarification,
and upgrade policies.

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The company introduced a serlf-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 PolicyBazaar’s
app but also take advantage of interesting features such as hospital locator, insurance premium
calculator, instant renewal of insurance policies, claim assistance and more.

POLICYBAZAAR

Headquarters Gurugram

Founder Yashish Dahiya, Alok Bansal and

Avaneesh Nirjar

Sector Fintech

Founded 2008

Parent Organization EtechAces Marketing and Consulting

Website Policybazaar.com

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 CHALLENGES FACED BY POLICYBZAAR

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.

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COMPETITORS:

 BankBazaar

 CoverFox

 EasyPolicy

 PolicyAdvisor

 Acko

 InsurancePandit

Policybazaar.com is primarily an insurance aggregation portal where, customers can compare

and buy insurance policies directly. With the Indian digital space, especially the digital payment
space, still in its early years processing online payments for insurance policies bought on the
portal was a challenge that the company faced. This is when the insurance giant decided to tie-up
with a payment gateway for processing its digital financial transactions. Although payment
gateways are highly regulated, most of them shy away from extending themselves to support
business partners.

The company’s another major concern centered around the complex models needed to enable
vendor payouts. In the insurance sector each payout is critical. While the solutions were
available, incorporating them into the organizational structure usually resulted in problems with
the vendor. The company holds its vendor partners in high regard. All they needed was a
payment gateway whose ideologies aligned with their need to put the Marketplace Model and
Net Settlement Models into effect

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 SCOPE OF INNOVATION

PolicyBazaar introduced a self-inspection video feature to solve the problem of expired

motor insurance. PolicyBazaar is the first web aggregator in India to provide this
feature on mobile – iOS and Android phones. It reduces the time and cost of the renewal
process and makes it more convenient for customers, while also reducing fraud and data
theft.

It takes 3-4 days or even 15 days for physical inspection by the company in order to
renew lapsed vehicle insurance. Using the PolicyBazaar app’s self-inspection video
feature, customers can now take a video on their own and upload it. It gets screened by
the PolicyBazaar call center team and is then sent to the insurer.

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Impact: As a result, a process that used to take 3-4 days has now been cut down to 3
hours, and provides the convenience of renewal at any time, from anywhere.

The digital transformation of this manual process of physical inspections has had a
great impact in terms of improvement in customer experience, reduced costs, and an
increase in conversions, and thereby higher sales and revenue. Earlier, it was
PolicyBazaar’s lowest converting segment. Digitizing it has resulted in:

1. 106% growth in lapsed insurance policy revenue within a span of 90 days of

implementation.

2. Renewal of lapsed policies has gone up by 60%. Before, PolicyBazaar could convert
about 50% of lapsed policies into renewals. Now they are converting 80%

3. 8,000 policies purchased in the first 90 days since implementation.

4. Motor insurance conversions have gone up by 51%.

5. Huge gain through cost reductions associated with physical inspections. Reduction in
cost of INR 350 per acquired policy to INR 200.

Not only is PolicyBazaar using this self-inspection video feature for themselves, but
also providing it as a white label service for insurers. It’s fair to assume that this will
bring even more insurers and many of their last minute or lapsed renewals to online
portals, once people get to know that it can be done online or on the phone in a couple
of hours. It’s a new opportunity for additional revenue that is created simply because of
digital innovation.

PayUmoney provided support to Policybazaar.com by implementing a seamless gateway through

the development of a mechanism which did not affect any of the three – vendors, the payment
gateway and the organisation.

“PayU has provided extensive support in making a customised end-to-end solution for us with
super-fast routing which has led to better success rates for transactions.”

– Harsh Vardhan Masta

Today, most of the organizations transactions are routed via the company’s payment page itself.

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 FINANCIAL AND OPERATING FEASIBILITY

Policy Bazaar.com is an aggregator website which helps 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 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

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 a total funding of more than $766.6M in 13 rounds from 22 investors. In
March 2021, the company raised $75 million funding from private equity round.

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 Funding
Date Stage Investor
Amount
Venture
May 2011 Undisclosed Intel Capital
Round
March 2013 Series A $4.6 Million Intel Capital and Inventus Capital Partners
Inventus Capital Partners, Info Edge, and Intel
April 2013 Series B $5 Million
Capital.
May 2014 Series C $20 Million Tiger Global Management
PremjiInvest, Tiger Global Management, Ribbit
April 2015 Series D $40 Million
Capital, Steadview Capital, ABG Capital.
Temasek, Tiger Global Management,Premji
October
Series E $77 Million Invest,Info Edge(India) Ltd and other undisclosed
2017
investors
May 2018 Series F $200 Million Softbank and InfoEdge(India)
Nov 2019 Series G $150 Million Tencent Holdings
July 2020 Series H $50 Million Softbank Vision Fund
Secondary
July 2020 $80 Million Softbank Vision Fund
Market
November Secondary
$20 Million True North
2020 Market
Secondary
March 2021 $45 Million True North & Angel Investors
Market
Private Equity
March 2021 $75 Million Falcon Edge Capital
Round

PolicyBazaar - Revenue/Valuation

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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.

SERVICE DESCRIPTION

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General Insurance:

 Car Insurance
 Bike Insurance
 Motor Insurance
 Third Party Car Insurance
 Third Party Bike Insurance
 Travel Insurance
 Commercial Vehicle Insurance

Health Insurance:

 Health Insurance
 1 Cr Health Cover
 Family Health Insurance
 Senior Citizen Health Insurance
 Coronavirus Insurance
 Corona Kavach Policy
 Corona Rakshak Policy
 Arogya Sanjeevani Policy

Life Insurance:

 Term Insurance
 Spouse Term Plan
 Return of Premium

Other Insurance:

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  Group Health Insurance
 Other General Insurance Products
 Cancer Insurance
 Home Insurance

Investment:

 Investment Plans
 Child Plans
 Pension Plans
 ULIPs
 Money Back Policy
 Endowment Policy
 Guaranteed Return Plans
 Tax Saving Plans

UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION (USP)

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 50+ Insurers partnered with PolicyBazaar which makes comparison easy

 Lowest Price guaranteed for all insurance plans available online

 Claims support built in with every policy for help, when you need it the most

 Unbiased Advice – Keeping customer first

 100% Reliable – Regulated by IRDAI

 Happy to help – Every day of the week

 DocPrime - an online medical service provider platform

OTHER INFORMATION

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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.

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 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 BUSINESS PARTNERS:

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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.

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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.

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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

 BAM Award – 2015

 Iconic IDC Insight Awards – 2015

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PolicyBazaar - Future Plans:

Major future plans of Policy Bazaar 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.

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 REFERENCES

● https://www.policybazaar.com/

● https://www.policybazaar.com/about-us/

● https://startuptalky.com/startup-story-policy-bazaar/

● https://payu.in/blog/policybazaar-and-payumoney-journey/

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THANK YOU!

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