MagicBricks.com Offers Home Insurance While PolicyBazaar.com Looks To Expand: The Insurance Game Online
In one of the more competitive niches online, MagicBricks.com has launched a value add of Home insurance for its users. The service has been launched in association with Optima Insurance Brokers. The policy has been specially designed for Magicbricks.com by Optima Insurance Brokers in association with Oriental Insurance Company Ltd.
According to their release, the policy provides a range from a bare minimum coverage for the home building to covers for all furnishings, domestic appliances, electronic products and jewelry against fire, floods, storms, earthquakes, terrorism and burglary. The complete process of registering, getting a quote, applying and paying for policy is online. The payment is also made here via secure credit card payment gateway.
Being a Times group company certainly helps MagicBricks in the fact that they can advertise and promote this as an USP with Times’ mainstream media power till the time otehrs catch up. And in an era where advertisers are looking for value addition to the mere visits of site users, this can be a major bait. MagicBricks used to charge their advertisers heavily for virtual tours, now with a product being retailed online (well service product) they can present a case of spending customers to either seek a premium or rope in newer advertisers on board.
PolicyBazaar Looks at Expanding Presence
In another bit of news in the online insurance retailing segment, policybazaar.com is said to be looking at expanding its offline presence nationwide. Policybazaar.com is an online non-life and life insurance aggregator by eTechAce. It plans to invest Rs 18 crore in expanding its offline presence besides taking up marketing initiatives across the country over the next one and a half years.
Infoedge had invested around 20 crores into PolicyBazaar last year, and it seems the company is planning to use the entire remaining amount of the investment into this expansion. In an interview immediately following the investment Infoedge had mentioned that the success of initiative similar to Policybazaar is what attracted them to be stakeholders.
” but the success of businesses like moneysupermarket.com and confused.com in the UK points in the direction of size being attractive.”
It would be interesting to see if these companies had followed a similar expansion policy or if PolicyBazaar is opting for an innovative India centric approach with this move. According to Yashish Dahiya, Co-Founder PloicyBazaar.com the company expects about 1,000 leads a day on the portal from March 2009. Policybazaar has tied up with insurance majors like Reliance Life, Tata AIG, Bajaj Allianz, Birla Sun Life and Mahindra Old Mutual Life. It had also got LIC the biggest insurance player in India into its fold recently.
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