E-commerce payments operator Paytm has been awarded an insurance broking licence for its subsidiary, Paytm Insurance Broking.
According to a report by Times of India, the company is looking to leverage its large online customer base and merchant network in order to distribute various insurance products.
The brokerage will initially distribute motor insurance (two-wheeler and four-wheeler), life insurance, and health insurance. It is also looking to harness its base of 16 million merchants as points of sale.
“We have been running a corporate agency model for more than two years now,” Paytm president Amit Nayyar was quoted as saying in the report. “One of the things that we discovered is that this structure restricts us to only a few insurers. We are extending our group philosophy of offering a broader suite of products to insurance.”
Nayyar also highlighted Paytm’s demographically diverse customer base, allowing the company to target various market segments by utilising its large levels of customer insights from its e-commerce operations.
“We will offer high-value term insurance policies and we will also sell bite-sized insurance products, as technology allows us to do that,” Nayyar added.
