After carving out a phenomenal success story on the vast Indian startup landscape, PolicyBazaar Group has now forayed into the UAE market with the launch of PolicyBazaar.ae.

Headquartered in Gurugram, India, PolicyBazaar is the world's leading fintech company and India's biggest insurance aggregator owned by EtechAces Marketing and Consulting Pvt Ltd.

The international expansion marks a milestone moment in the decade-old journey of PolicyBazaar Group that has shortlisted Dubai to serve as a hub for the UAE operations.

"We have been at the forefront of initiating the change in the way India consumes financial products, and the foray into the international market is a momentous occasion for us. Our expansion into the UAE market is based on the same philosophy of developing a strong tech-based platform that makes consumers the king in their ability to choose a gamut of financial products," Yashish Dahiya, co-founder and chief executive officer, PolicyBazaar, says.

Dahiya along with Alok Bansal, co-founder and CFO, started their entrepreneurial journey in India in 2008 with the intent to set up a platform that offers ease and convenience of buying insurance products online.

From receiving traffic of 180,000 visitors in 2008, PolicyBazaar.com has come a long way and today hosts over 100 million visitors yearly and records sale of nearly 300,000 transactions a month. Currently, PolicyBazaar.com accounts for nearly 25 per cent of India's life cover, and over 7 per cent of India's retail health business. It accounts for roughly half of all Internet based insurance purchase in India and is more than doubling annually.

"Presence of a huge Indian diaspora who have prior familiarity with the brand and can potentially emerge as our word of mouth brand ambassador certainly contributed to our decision of identifying UAE as our first international market," Neeraj Gupta, CEO, Policybazaar.ae, says.

"The initial business numbers have been very encouraging, and above of what our expectations were," he says.

"However, we are aware that each market is unique and has its own sensibilities that we will need to adopt. We cannot have a one-size fits all approach for all markets and being aware of this fact has allowed us to reach where we are. While the business model will be replicated in the UAE market, the consumers, their requirements and the expectations are different. We are prepared and willing to learn the curves of the local market and adapt accordingly," Gupta continues.

Gupta says that PolicyBazaar.ae is planning to increase the number of product offerings and insurers on the marketplace by inking strategic agreements, which will enable it to offer a wide plethora of insurance and personal finance product to the consumer.

"We intend to write Dh50 million premium in the next 12 months and scale it to about Dh200 million," he says.

Aman Dhall, head, Corporate Communications, PolicyBazaar Group of Companies, claims that the consumer-centric approach is the biggest strength of the company in solving business problems.

"Having a rich consumer data of the past 10 years has helped us in developing products and solutions that offer maximum value to our consumers," Dhall says.

Gupta says that he sees PoicyBazaar as a cohesive conglomerate with a much wider global presence having interests in insurtech, fintech and healthtech space in the next five years.

The company has backing from a host of investors including the likes of Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global Management, True North, InfoEdge (Naukri.com), Premji Invest, besides investments from other PE funds and family offices.

"We have a valuation in excess of $1 billion after we concluded the recent Series F round led by Softbank Vision Fund and raised $238 million in June this year," Gupta says.

"Including the seed funding, PolicyBazaar Group have had seven rounds of funding and raised over $375 million.

"We are well capitalised and have a robust balance sheet, which is more than sufficient to cover our expenses. Hence, raising funds is not immediately on the cards. However, as our business expands the possibility cannot be ruled out," Gupta says.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder and vice-chairman of InfoEdge, says that a robust business model is an essential part of the decision-making for an investor to put money in any business.

"However, at InfoEdge, it is not necessarily a deal clincher because we put equal emphasis on the team along with the idea as our experience has taught us that successes in the startup ecosystem occur in large part due to the ability of the founding team to successfully implement the blueprint that they would present," Bikhchandani says.

"In the case of Policybazaar.com, both factors were equally robust and the successful transformation from a single entity to running multiple businesses in insurtech, fintech and health tech ecosystem has only reinforced this belief of ours. We expect similar success to be replicated in the UAE because the company has strong fundamentals and ethics," Bikhchandani concluded.

- riaz@khaleejtimes.com