Racing Ahead with the Best Policies

From agents going door to door selling insurance to consumers coming to a platform asking for insurance is perhaps the biggest victory for Policybazaar.

- Shipra Singh

For Yashish Dahiya, business is about focusing on resolving the problem at hand and not chasing valuations. “You will rarely hear me talk about our premium or valuation or revenue,” the co-founder and CEO of Policybazaar group of companies told Entrepreneur India in an interview.

“We are only concerned with solving the pressing issue of death, disease and disability, which affects everyone, through insurance,” he says.

It is perhaps the result of his steady focus on solving the consumer’s problem that the insuretech unicorn is the largest insurance web aggregator in the country, which claims to hold 93 per cent market share in the online aggregation space.

Solving the 3Ds

The genesis of Policybazaar lies in the twin problems of misselling and low penetration of pure life and health insurance products ailing the insurance industry. “Our first campaign was Ullu Mat Bano to spread awareness against misselling of insurance products,” Dahiya recalls. The IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad alum co-founded Policybazaar in 2008 with Alok Bansal and Avaneesh Nirjar.

The idea was so powerful that even the 2007-08 recession did not deter the trio from starting up. “We thought there’s a whole industry which has a major communication problem. Wrong products are going to the consumer and the reach of right product, which is protection against death, disease and disability is very limited. It was too big a problem to worry about a downturn. The idea was clear and we had to implement it,” he says. Yes, Policybazaar has addressed the problem to a great extent. In fact, according to Dahiya term insurance was almost not sold at all before Policybazaar and the company has been a driving force in creating a market for the product over the last 10 years.