What's helping BankBazaar hit revenues of Rs 240 Cr this year

With investments in place, BankBazaar's Adhil Shetty claims the business to be growing organically, looking to exit the fiscal year with a revenue of Rs 240 crore.  

Recently, Indian financial marketplace BankBazaar raised a massive $30 million from credit reporting agency, Experian.

For the global credit giant Experian, this marked their first investment in the Indian startup scene. Not to say that Experian isn’t scouting opportunities to land a stake at BankBazaar’s rival businesses.

However, on Monday, BankBazaar Co-founder and CEO, Adhil Shetty spoke to YourStory on the company’s performance over the course of the year, stating an organic growth of its business.

In October this year, Adhil stated that the BankBazaar platform got close to 23 million visitors, marking a 100 percent growth from October last year which saw close to 11.5 million visitors.

Not sharing absolute figures, Adhil also commented that the company recorded 129 percent higher net revenue from last year. Meanwhile, the company claimed to grow its expenses only by 27 percent overall.

Going by the current run rate, the founders are positive that the firm will be able to reach Rs 240 crore in revenue by the end of this fiscal year.

However, conversion rates continue to be around one to two percent, which is industry average for Indian fintech businesses.

Adhil said,

There is a clear realisation that businesses need to grow organically and our metrics seem to be stating the same. Growth has to be organic. Further, we also saw that our cost per transaction has gone down by 17 percent, which essentially includes customer acquisition cost as well as a variable cost to support transactions.

So, what's helping BankBazaar to reach such a growth?

Adhil attributes this growth to BankBazar's significant push towards ‘paperless’ deployment of financial products. At present, 60 percent of their total products on the platform are offered in a paperless digital manner, not requiring customers to submit any physical documents. Adhil stated,

Digital paperless businesses have the ability to make net margins of almost 80 percent, while traditional call centre businesses or businesses run by offline agents only make 10 percent net margins on product sold.

Of growth and more 

Speaking on the investments till now, Adhil commented that a significant portion of the company’s Rs 375 crore Series C funding is still in the bank.

Further, to give flight to their international aspirations and increase margins, the company had committed to invest close to $3 million for expansion in Singapore and Malaysia each.

Moreover, with 85 financial institutions on board, BankBazaar estimates that it has added close to 15 to 20 new financial institutions over the course of this year.

Besides, this year, BankBazaar added new products to its portfolio including two-wheeler insurance and free consumer credit score in association with Experian.

Early in January, the firm also launched completely paperless mutual funds.

Speaking about the top products on the marketplace, Adhil commented,

Mutual funds on the platform are growing at an extremely fast rate. Further, banking products like home and car loans saw the highest growth rate during Diwali. However, credit card and personal loans continue to be the most popular products on the platform.

However, the company doesn’t plan to introduce newer products over the course of the year.

We are not looking at launching new products anytime soon. The problem with too many products is that it is a distraction from our USP. For us, what is required right now is to go deep with focus and expertise.