New Delhi:
India's largest payments and financial services platform Paytm, on Tuesday announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Paytm Insurance Broking Private Limited (PIBPL), has secured its license to sell life and non-life insurance from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI).
Through its 100 per cent subsidiary PIBPL, the company will now offer insurance products across four categories including two-wheeler, four-wheeler, health and life. PIBPL has already tied up with 20 of the leading insurance firms in India and would be integrating with 30 more companies over the next few weeks.
The company recently surrendered its 'corporate agency’ license for obtaining the brokerage license. Other than online initiatives, the company would be leveraging on its 16 million-strong merchant partner base to sell its insurance products all over the country.
Amit Nayyar, President- Paytm said, "Our entry into Insurance Broking is in line with our commitment to broaden our footprint into financial services and offering numerous and customized choices to millions of our customers. This would enable us to offer a wider suite of product offerings from a large set of insurance partners. The potential of the insurance business is huge as the market is still under-penetrated in India. Paytm Insurance is going to give millions of our users the option of buying bite-sized insurance products at a competitive price. As a company, we fully rely and trust on our merchant partners, selling insurance products and augmenting their income options while driving penetration."
The company is in the process of shortlisting merchant partners who would be trained to become Point of Sales Persons (PoSPs). The company plans to rope in 2 lakh such PoSPs this year.Building a large network of PoSP, PIBPL plans to increase the reach of insurance products to a large customer base. The firm would be empowering millions of merchants with alternate income sources which they would earn through commissions on selling insurance products.
PIBPL over the last several months has been working extensively to understand the needs of customers for insurance products and will be offering innovative insurance products in a seamless and easy to understand the online journey. The company would also provide policy management and claim services for customers.
One97 Communications Ltd (OCL), the parent company of Paytm, had forayed into in the insurance space over three years back when it entered the corporate agency business. The company started with offering appropriate attachment products on Paytm transactions to evolve into a marketplace for all insurance products. ,
Recently BSE-Ebix Insurance Broking Pvt. Ltd., a joint venture ,between Ebix, Inc. a leading international supplier of On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance, financial, healthcare and e-learning industries, and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), had received its insurance broking license from the IRDAI to become a direct insurance broker (Life and General) under
BSE-Ebix aims to offer numerous choices to customers, besides reaching to remote villages across India to access these products. The venture will make use of the reach of both BSE and EbixCash that spans over 3 lakh outlets across the country, and shall cover the entire insurance lifecycle from customer relationship management, agency management, multi-quoting, underwriting, policy creation, claims filing and settlement to back-end insurance policy administration.