EaseMyTrip is looking to launch its insurance platform in next four to five months after the travel-tech company announced the launch of its new subsidiary, EaseMyTrip Insurance Broker Private Limited on January 10.
The company is in discussions on whether to integrate the insurance segment on the existing website of EaseMyTrip or to launch a separate platform for insurance business.
"There are multiple innovations which we are doing. We are looking forward to launch in the next 4-5 months. Whether there will be a separate platform or all in one, that is up for the discussion within the team right now where there pro and cons of both the sides are being discussed. So, the team is in place. We have hired senior people from the insurance sector to help us set it up and we are letting them decide on how to go about it," Prashant Pitti, Co-founder, EaseMyTrip, told Moneycontrol.
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He said that under the insurance arm of the company, they will aggregate all the insurance products including health, life, more motor vehicle, travel, among others.
"We did our internal survey and we found out that there's a massive overlap of more than 75 percent of people who are booking their flights online and also who are purchasing insurance online. We have a consumer base of 20 million people and out of those about 15 million people would be the target market who are actually purchasing insurance online. Hence, there was a very clear overlap which we could capitalize by using our existing brand value," Pitti added.
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He further said that they want to only work with high order value products.
"We don't want to work with products which are of Rs 200. Also, we will not be the issuers of the insurance. We would be the aggregators of the insurance products," the co-founder said.
Pitti expects to save on marketing cost for the insurance aggregator service. "For most of the insurance aggregator, the biggest line item cost they have is the marketing and promotion. We believe we will be able to offset that cost because we already have a brand name. We haven't pinpointed the exact name of the brand yet, but it will be related to ease. We are looking forward to capitalize the existing brand value and reduce our marketing expenditure to almost nil and grow this business profitable in the first year itself," he added.
The company's board on January 2 had approved the raising of funds of up to Rs 1,000 crore. "More than 50 percent of the amount would be used for acquisition to grow organically specifically in non-air space. It could be bus, hotel, holidays or cabs. We're not very excited about railways because it's a monopolistic market. Beyond that, all the other spaces we are looking for companies that are bootstrapped, profitable, very disruptive in nature.
And there are multiple companies with whom we are already talking to," Pitti said.
He pointed out that this year there will be one or two big-ticket acquisitions.
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