The Bankbazaar.com story - A brand that offers you largest number of financial products online

As Founder & CEO of BankBazaar, I set myself the vision of making BankBazaar.com the go-to brand for inves-tors and loan aspirants which is bound to shift the contours of how loans, cards and insurance products are bought by individuals.

How the Bankbazaar.com dream began:

My brother and co-founder Arjun Shetty, was interested in buying a home in India. Getting the home-loan for it was a tiring and tedious process and he faced some of the common frustrations that a consumer faces while searching for the best deal on a home loan. There was no clarity on the process, too much documentation, and a lot of difficulty in comparing offers across lenders. Above all, very often the information provided by the agents proved to be wrong. Arjun came from a strong technology and banking background and couldn’t understand why this process was so difficult. Arjun ran the world’s single largest online acquisition channel for cards with Amazon in the USA. Frustrated with the entire process of getting a home loan, he, along with Rati and I, decided to develop a credit-processing platform for the Indian banking industry. Hence, in 2007, we decided to come back to India and started BankBazaar.com.

What makes Bankbazaar unique:

The biggest factor that sets us apart from the rest is that BankBazaar is not merely an aggregator. We offer the largest number of financial products in the market as well as the largest number of partner organizations including the biggest nationalized and private banks, NBFCs, and insurance companies. Currently we have partnered with more than 50 institutions to provide more than 100 distinct products.

BankBazaar.com provides an end-to-end financial services. We have a full-fledged application platform where people can search of offers, select the one that suits them the best, and then apply for it online. BankBazaar.com does not close the process with the application. We provide constant support and assistance at every stage of the application process all the way to the final disbursal. Unlike our competitors, we do not follow a lead-based system where all customer details are passed on to different banks as leads. Only once an application is submitted are the customer details are passed on the respective bank along with the application. We have strict privacy norms in place to make sure that customer data is not passed on to any third party, so there are practically zero chances that our customers will be spammed.

Our customer acquisition strategy:

BankBazaar’s goal is to help consumers access the right financial products and grow to be the dominant marketplace for financial products. To achieve these twin goals, we have simplified banking so that that it is as easy as shopping. We have made sure our customers have access to the maximum number of products from the widest range of financial institutions. We have introduced and strengthened mobile access and have made several processes, such as PAN card verification and bank statement submission, completely paperless. Our main challenge at this point is the customer mindset, which has still not moved out of the traditional thinking that personal finance is tricky and complicated, and better left to experts. To overcome this challenge, we have started many initiatives to provide resources across media from blogs to videos for customers to educate themselves on all personal finance related matters.

Our revenue generation model:

BankBazaar.com’s revenue comes from applications-based commission from banks. There is no commission or charge to customers. We are not lead-based aggregators but application-based end-to-end financial service providers.

Our road map for next five years:

BankBazaar.com will continue to focus on mobile and paperless technology in 2016. Additionally, we will be focusing on market development for Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities as well as increasing our market penetration in the Metro cities. We are also speeding up our efforts to provide customer authentication. BankBazaar.com’s vision is to deliver completely paperless financial transactions with the shortest sales cycle, and we are looking to make this vision a reality in 2016.

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