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Online financial services marketplace BankBazaar expects to exit this financial year with profitability at the EBITDA level for the month of March 2020.
The move to profitability was accelerated by an almost 100 per cent increase in organic traffic between October 2019 and January 2020 which drove the registered customer base to over four crore users who have transacted on BankBazaar, up from 3.6 crore users in September, a top executive told BusinessLine .
The company saw a 46 per cent increase in monthly revenue and a 17 per cent reduction in costs during this period. This was largely due to the popularity of its core offerings - the free credit score product and its decade-old partnerships with over 50 of India’s leading banks and NBFCs for credit products including credit cards, personal loans, auto loans and home loans. Additionally, the BankBazaar mobile app actively advises consumers on improving their credit worthiness and managing their personal finances better, a model that is similar to Credit Karma in the US, whose offering reaches a third of all Americans who have a credit score.
“In 2019, the slowdown in the Indian economy affected all sectors including BFSI. According to an RBI report, year-on-year, non-food bank credit growth decelerated to 7.2 per cent in November 2019 from 13.8 per cent in November 2018. The impact of this slowdown was felt across the fintech sector, and BankBazaar like the rest, started FY20 on a tough note. However, we bucked the trend from the start of Q3, growing consistently for four successive months and are on track to close March 2020 with EBITDA-level profitability. We also expect to be EBITDA profitable for the full year in FY21,” said Adhil Shetty, co-founder and CEO of BankBazaar.
The company has been focused on building great paperless consumer experiences and business profitability, which stood it in good stead in a difficult market situation.
“Paperless technology is a game changer for India and key to the democratisation of finance as it drastically cuts the cost of operations and increases speed of delivery of the smallest financial product to the remotest part of India. We knew that a fully digital experience delivered via free credit score to our consumers and instant paperless checkout was a winning formula for this downturn market,” he said.
BankBazaar has raised $110 million through funding to date, from investors such as Amazon, Experian, Sequoia, Fidelity Eight Roads, and Walden.
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