Policybazaar.com to Foray into Healthcare Tech and Service Space

• Aims to help 5 million people over next two years

• Change the way India seeks quality healthcare services

ETechAces Marketing & Consulting Pvt. Ltd. (“ETechAces”), which owns India’s leading insurtech brand, PolicyBazaar.com (“PolicyBazaar”) and India’s leading lending marketplace, PaisaBazaar.com (“PaisaBazaar”), is now foraying into the healthcare tech & service space. 

As part of its plans to capture the out of pocket healthcare market in India estimated at nearly $100+bn, the new venture will provide free online and over phone medical consultations, to begin with. It aims to provide 1 million free medical consultations by March 2019 and reach the scale of 5 million by March 2020. 

Given that social security support on healthcare services front is either very limited or difficult to access for the general public, the venture aims to redefine the way India seeks quality medical services, just like its parent company has done it for the insurance segment.

Speaking on the latest venture, Yashish Dahiya, Co-founder & CEO, PolicyBazaar Group of Companies said: "Our vision is to change customer behavior in the healthcare space by making the consumer shift to online medical consultation from offline by building an easy to use, convenient and trustworthy solution. We believe that healthcare space has huge potential to disrupt, and can follow the same growth trajectory as the digital insurance space which initially faced a similar kind of consumer inertia that this space faces."

India has one of the lowest ratios for a doctor per 1,000 people amongst the developing countries. Having a physical interaction with a medical practitioner is not only a time-consuming process but also an expensive one, especially in the private sector. Even though government hospitals and state-run health centers offer consultations either free of cost or at subsidized pricing, it's not easy to get an access to these services.

Adding further on this initiative, Mr. Dahiya said: "We will be building a team of certified and quality medical professionals to give free online consultations to customers. This shall be supported by a robust offline network. AI will play a key role in helping us build this in scale and efficiency."

About PolicyBazaar.com

PolicyBazaar.com is India's largest insurance marketplace. It has backing from a host of investors including the likes of Temasek, Tiger Global Management, True North, InfoEdge (Naukri.com), Premji Invest, besides investments from other PE funds and family offices. The portal started with a purpose to educate people on insurance products and has had a significant influence on how insurance is bought in India. It has helped in driving penetration of pure life insurance, health insurance, and such products which were barely bought earlier.

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% of India’s life cover, and over 7% of India’s retail health business. It accounts for roughly half of all internet based insurance purchase in the country and is more than doubling annually.

We have received several accolades in India and globally. The most noteworthy being recognized as India’s top and world’s leading “Fin Tech Innovator” by the Global consultancy firm, KPMG and venture capital fund, H2 Ventures for 2015 & 2016. It has won a range of awards in the last couple of years, many of them consecutively. These include The Financial Express “Best Fintech Marketplace”, Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) Digital India Award for “Best Financial Website” & “Most Innovating Insurance Service”, IDC Iconic Award for “Tech Implementation leading to Operational Excellence”, to name a few.

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