BankBazaar.com, India’s leading free credit score provider and online financial product marketplace, announced its revenue in December 2020 grew against December 2019 revenues, indicating that the business has recovered much of the lost ground due to COVID-19. The primary driver for growth were credit cards, and the December 2020 revenue from the category has exceeded the December 2019 revenues by 20%. Interestingly, 72% of the credit transactions is now contactless in less than a year since start of Digital KYC, indicating a dramatic shift to fully digitised disbursals. The company is now poised to close this financial year with operational month-on-month profitability by March 2021 in spite of COVID-19 related difficulties, thereby giving the consumer B2C FinTech platform combined growth with profitability in the upcoming financial year.

Arjun Shetty, COO, BankBazaar

BankBazaar focussed on its contactless platform business during the pandemic, as it anticipated that the first and strongest revival would take place in that segment. Arjun Shetty, COO, BankBazaar, explains the reasons behind this: “The pandemic demanded that we realign our strategy taking into account the requirements and challenges posed by the changed circumstances. Consequently, we realised the fastest revival would be amongst the digitally savvy banks and led by contactless issuance of credit, and we aligned our strategies to meet this demand from both customers and partners. That has paid off for us very strongly. The combination of our deployment of AI and ML predictive matching and facilitation of Digital KYC solutions helped us scale up contactless delivery of credit products to 72% of our total portfolio in less than a year of its launch and reclaim growth in the middle of the pandemic.”

Product-wise, the strongest revival was seen in credit cards. Demand for new credit cards in October 2020 was higher than the demand in October 2019 at BankBazaar, and revenue from credit cards grew by more than 20% year on year. Industry data also bears this out. As per RBI data, the number of active cards grew to almost 60Mn in October 2020, and credit card spends exceeded March 2020 numbers around the same time. “There are two reasons we are seeing such strong revival in the credit card segment,” explains Shetty. “The first is the need for essential digital payments using credit cards sharpened during the pandemic. The second and equally compelling reason is the way credit cards were the first to implement contactless application processes via Digital KYC and are now the most easily accessible form of credit. Going forward into the coming year, we expect to see the same acceleration in the loan segment as new originations for personal loans return to pre-COVID levels riding on Digital KYC.”

While the biggest chunk of BankBazaar’s Digital KYC customers was from the metros (64.40%), applications from non-metros (35.60%) have been steadily gaining ground. Maximum applications were from the South (39.91%) closely followed by the North (31.60%). West (21.18%) and East (7.32%) were in the third and fourth position, respectively.

BankBazaar.com is India’s first neutral online marketplace that gives instant customized offers on loans and credit cards. It also provides customers free consumer credit score on its portal. Over 50+ of India’s leading financial institutions have chosen to integrate themselves with the platform. BankBazaar has so far raised USD 116M in funding from investors such as Experian, Eight Roads, Sequoia India, Walden International, WSV, and Amazon.