A marketplace for personal finance products, BankBazaar.com, which was targeting to add 400 employees in 2107-18, hit that number in October, and is now in the process of adding 300 more by the end of this fiscal year.
The company has taken up a new office space of 20,000 sq ft in Bengaluru, and is scouting for 50,000 sq ft of office space in Pune, Jaipur or Navi Mumbai to set up its second operations and customer service centre.
“This fiscal has been going very well for us, and in October we were trending at 129 per cent YoY growth in revenue, while total costs went up by just 27 per cent and marketing spend remained flat. Traffic to our site has grown from 11.5 million visitors a month last November to 23 million visitors a month, this November. Up to 2 per cent of the visitors transact on our site,” Adhil Shetty, co-founder and CEO of BankBazaar.com told
“We hired 400 people by October and are hiring 300 more this fiscal year to support our growth, which will take our headcount to 1,750 by March 2018,” he said.
The nine-year-old company kicked off the hiring process in April, at a time when other early-growth stage start-ups were laying off employees in an effort to cut costs and achieve profitability. Over the last few months, BankBazaar has strengthened its top management deck, hiring former Hitachi executive, Ramesh Srinivasan, as its CFO and former Visa executive, Vipin Kalra, as its CEO for , International Business.
Malaysian operations
The company expanded its Asia presence beyond Singapore to Malaysia recently, and is scouting for a country head and an account management team there. Plans are to enter the UAE market next year. “This year, we invested $(Singapore) 3 million in the Singapore market and half a million Singapore dollars in the Malaysia market,” said Shetty.
Pointing out that Indians are going online like never before, especially after demonetisation, Shetty said “BankBazaar’s biggest proposition to our customer base, in the age profile of 25-30 years, is the 5-minute access to financial products on their mobiles. Today, 75 per cent of our traffic is from mobile devices, and we are seeing 200,000 downloads of our mobile app every month. Our biggest channel of growth is from repeat customers.”
The company has partnered with 85 of the top Banking, Insurance and Mutual Fund companies to offer a range of products, including home/car/personal loans, credit cards, mutual funds, fixed deposits, and car/ life/health insurance. The company has raised a total of $110 million in four rounds of funding to date, from Amazon, Sequoia, Fidelity, Walden and Experian.