The unbridled pace of urbanisation has spawned a plethora of woes for people in cities and towns alike, with finding space for car parking being one of them. In a city like Delhi, an average commuter has to spend around 80 hours or over 240 km yearly just to find a parking space, a study conducted by Frost Sullivan revealed in 2020.

There are also incidences of violence over occupancy, road rage and disfigured cars due to space crunch, overcharging for parking. This is where Binu Thamarashan Girija, a Keralite entrepreneur based in the US wanted to make an intervention.

Way.com is born

Which he did, by incubating in Silicon Valley Way.com, a D2C (direct to consumer) marketplace that simplifies and facilitates travel, auto insurance, auto refinance, and roadside assistance under a single platform in all the 50 States of the US. The auto fintech platform, through its partnerships, delivers services across the lifetime of cars in a seamless and cost-effective manner.

Way.com was featured on this year’s world’s top marketplace 100 list, affirming its position in the American market as a super auto fintech app with a suite of automotive solutions, including car finance, insurance, parking, car wash, and roadside assistance.

Recently, its car insurance vertical was ranked the #1 auto insurance app in product quality by unit Q. The company operates an extension office employing 200 personnel at the Technopark here in Thiruvananthapuram.

Bouquet of services

Based on Gross Merchandise Value from Bloomberg Second Measure, and consumer data from Apptopia and SimilarWeb, Way.com ranks 48th on the list of consumer-facing marketplace start-ups and private companies. In an interaction, Girija told BusinessLine that his company has plans to add vehicle loans to the bouquet of services .

“We currently use one payment gateway service, Stripe. If you are talking about refinance auto loans, we work with 20 banks today,” he said. There are companies that handle these services independently in the US. “But what we are doing is unique, by vertically integrating them all onto one platform. This ensures ease of use, convenience, and cost savings for customers.”

Way.com is a completely digital business, Girija explains. “We do have some plans to test the market out with a one-time sign-up facility. We implemented AI and ML heavily during Covid time which really helped us with predictive analytics, and in turn in terms of utilisation and profitability,” he said.

EV charing station finder

On outlook for EV charging station finders, he said for an EV car owner in the US, the first problem is that there is no aggregation of information available. People have to download multiple apps to find where the charging stations are, or to reserve time to charge. There is no consolidation space where they can find what they need.

“We are changing that by offering multiple EV services in our app, from a charging station location finder to charging costs, and power level data,” he said. Way.com is also working with gas companies to figure a way to incentivse people to save on gas (cash for gas) ‘during this time of inflation and extremely high fuel costs.’

‘Mparivahan lacks strategy’

Responding to a question on government of India’s efforts in the auto super app space, Girija said the Mparivahan offers standard services like car registrations and renewals. “It’s easy to build an app, but the biggest gap I’ve seen is the lack of a go-to market strategy. That major piece is missing,” he said.

If one looks at the stats of the app today, there may be one million people who download it, which is just .3 per cent of the total vehicle population of around 295 million. “That itself indicates that a go-to market strategy is missing. They should really promote it through every government office they have. There are 38 languages in India, so making it a multilingual app would really help,” Girija said.

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