Mister Insurer Back in 2014 when Dahiya was trying to raise capital, almost everybody was telling him that don't raise it for an insurance distribution company, raise it for an insurance company. And there were investors lining up and saying "if you were doing an insurance company, I would like to fund you."
By Punita Sabharwal •
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14months back, a high-flying fintech startup, PolicyBazaar dared to go public. The stock price pressure is not easy to be handled for everyone but Yashish Dahiya is an Iron Man (pun intended). He's not one to take the pressure.
Talking about his tryst with the market, Yashish Dahiya, Chairman & CEO, PB Fintech Limited says, "I think as a business we continue to grow. Today, we are about double the size in terms of revenues or premiums from where we were when we listed. We are in a far healthier position from a contribution perspective, from a profitability perspective. I am a firm believer that you have to control the controllable. The market is not something that you should even try to control and I think it's almost worse if somebody could claim they can control the market. I don't think we know what markets do to us and they keep doing different things at different times. But we as a business stay focused on our deliverables, and our performance, which for us the one priority is growth. Priority two is profitability."
Back in 2014 when Dahiya was trying to raise capital, almost everybody was telling him that don't raise it for an insurance distribution company, raise it for an insurance company. And there were investors lining up and saying "if you were doing an insurance company, I would like to fund you." The weak moment at that stage for him would have been saying this is right, so let me do it. Rather he chose the difficult path, saying no to those fundamentals that don't match, and chose to build it the steady way for the long run. As he says, "Build your business because you fundamentally believe in it."
The comparison and buying platform for insurance has been a steady business and continues to grow. In the words of Dahiya, it's a highly boring business that continues to do boring things every day but does 1% better than yesterday. And is being done for the last 15 years and the same DNA applies to Paisabazaar. It provides people with the choice of loans, and as a marketplace, they keep evolving some incremental service every year. As Dahiya believes in telling his children too, "You can never beat somebody who just never stops." That remains to be the DNA of PB Fintech and keeps them high on the popularity graph.
Dahiya's consistency and audacity can be gauged from the fact that once when a high-profile person came and said he's gonna shut down his company, who actually had the power to do so. But what Dahiya said at that stage was very characteristic of how he usually behaves in such situations. As Dahiya remembers, he said, "I'm like Karan, I'm doing my duty. What I think is right, you are like Arjun, you have it in your hand. You have to decide whether you want to fire or not. I can't decide for you. Why are you telling me? You do whatever you have to do." He was saying it because that was a natural thought that came to him. His partner told Dahiya later that he was actually threatening the person.
As he now laughs, "If you have the guts, do it. I don't care. But I wasn't saying it that way. I was generally saying it because that's who I am." As it happened, that person backed off. That tells about the naivety of Dahiya whether in that moment or 14 months back when the company went public being unaffected by the market's ups and downs or now when people question the enterprise of making profits. In the words of Dahiya, "I still believe our biggest challenge in the next 10 years is actually growth. It's not profitability. We have so much profitability that it will become a problem for us. Our challenge is what scale do we achieve before we get to that stage of being super profitable."
FACTS:
Founded in: 2008
2014: Launched Paisabazaar
No. of employees: 13,000
Turnover: 12000 crore ape run rate
Listed in: 2021
Insurance Premium 100 billion (ARR Q2 FY23)
Loan Disbursals 120 billion (ARR Q2 FY23)
Insurance Policies Sold 29.8 million (Till Sep-22)
Credit Score Customers 31 million (Till Sep-22)
