Paytm has ventured into the financial distribution space.
Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba backed One97 Communications, more popularly known as Paytm will now sell life insurance and non-life insurance policies. IRDAI’s latest data on status of corporate agents shows that the insurance regulator has grant corporate agency license to One97 Communications with effect from August 2017. Currently, corporate agents can sell insurance policies of three life, three non-life and three stand-alone health insurance policies.
Paytm will mainly face competition from banks, as most of the banks are corporate agents. Currently, there are over 400 corporate agents in India.
In addition, a few media reports suggest that Paytm will sell mutual funds. It is pertinent to mention here that its promoter Alibaba followed a similar strategy where they deployed the surplus funds of their sellers in liquid funds through their wealth advisory arm Ant Financials (then Alipay), which proved to be a big success. Later, the company expanded their distribution business by offering other mutual fund schemes and financial products.