The Fintech 50

Incepted last year, we've published our annual Fintech 50 list, covering the top private companies that are transforming finance through technology. The months-long process that involves a team of reporters and editors evaluates hundreds of companies and ultimately choose 50. We look for companies making a deep impact on consumers and businesses through innovation. This typically means they're growing faster than competitors, regularly releasing new products or making major strategic improvements-not simply offering services that have looked the same for years. Here are those who've made it to the list this year.

- Punita Sabharwal With S Shanthi, Priya Kapoor, Paromita Gupta, Saptak Bardhan, Kabir Singh Bhandari, Soumya Duggal, Shrabona Ghosh, Kavya Pillai & Teena Jose

MISTER INSURER

YASHISH DAHIYA, CHAIRMAN & CEO, PB FINTECH LIMITED

14 months back, a high-flying fintech startup, PolicyBazaar dared to go public. The stock price pressure is not easy to be handled for everyone but Yashish Dahiya is an Iron Man (pun intended). He’s not one to take the pressure. Talking about his tryst with the market, Yashish Dahiya, Chairman & CEO, PB Fintech Limited says, “I think as a business we continue to grow. Today, we are about double the size in terms of revenues or premiums from where we were when we listed. We are in a far healthier position from a contribution perspective, from a profitability perspective. I am a firm believer that you have to control the controllable. The market is not something that you should even try to control and I think it’s almost worse if somebody could claim they can control the market. I don’t think we know what markets do to us and they keep doing different things at different times. But we as a business stay focused on our deliverables, and our performance, which for us the one priority is growth. Priority two is profitability.”

Back in 2014 when Dahiya was trying to raise capital, almost everybody was telling him that don’t raise it for an insurance distribution company, raise it for an insurance company. And there were investors lining up and saying “if you were doing an insurance company, I would like to fund you.” The weak moment at that stage for him would have been saying this is right, so let me do it. Rather he chose the difficult path, saying no to those fundamentals that don’t match, and chose to build it the steady way for the long run. As he says, “Build your business because you fundamentally believe in it.”