BankBazaar’s operating revenue jumps 91 percent in financial year 2017-2018 primarily driven by a 135 percent jump in organic transactions.
BankBazaar, India’s leading online financial services marketplace, announced a 91% growth in the company’s operating revenues for FY18. The operating revenue grew to Rs. 103 Cr, up from Rs.54 Cr in FY17. The company’s total revenues for FY18 also grew to Rs. 118 Cr from Rs. 71 Cr in FY 17. According to the company, this revenue growth was fueled largely by an increase in organic visits, which accounted for almost 70% of the total traffic.
BankBazaar over the years has become synonymous with personal finance in India. In FY18, the website traffic more than doubled and as many as 42% of these were returning visitors. Over 57 million people searched for Credit Cards while 63.5 million people searched for loans on BankBazaar. The high number of organic and returning customers helped BankBazaar control customer acquisition costs.
This is evident from the fact that the total marketing costs, including brand marketing as a percentage of revenue, fell by 30% compared to the previous year. Further, salary cost as a percentage of revenue also fell by 43%, which indicates strong economies of scale as the tech-driven platform continues to grow. Consequently, EBITDA losses as percentage of revenue came down by 34%, highlighting the efficiency with which BankBazaar has managed to rein in overall expenses. These numbers for FY18 are unaudited and may see minor changes when the audited report is submitted.
Speaking on the great run, Adhil Shetty, Co-Founder and CEO, BankBazaar, said: ‘’We have made tremendous strides and come up on top, thanks to our laser-focused vision and a great team working on making it a reality. We saw both investors and customers believing in our vision and wanting to join our journey of making personal finance paperless and presenceless. We continued to attract investors in our Series D, with Experian joining our existing marquee investors like Amazon, Seqouia Capital, Walden International, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Mousse Partners. At the same time, we saw customers across India, metros and non-metros, increasingly preferring to go the online way with us. We are confident of impressive growth in the coming year as well.”
BankBazaar believes paperless, presenceless digital finance is the future of Personal Finance in India. Since its introduction 15 months ago, paperless has grown to account for over 18% of BankBazaar’s total transactions. By the end of FY19, the company expects to scale up paperless to 50% of the total transactions. BankBazaar’s focus for FY19 is to dive deeper into the paperless value chain by bringing new partners and customers into the fold.
“Our online paperless model has 3X conversions at half the costs, compared to offline models. This will not only help us scale up our revenue rapidly, but also reduce our rate of cash-burn. We are looking to close the last quarter of this year as EBITDA profitable,” adds Ramesh Srinivasan, CFO, BankBazaar.
BankBazaar is expecting over 400mn visitors in FY19. The company has also grown to 1800+ employees to support this growth. The company is also preparing for an IPO in 2020-22.