Come October 10, investors can buy insurance policies while they shop on the big billion-day Flipkart sale.
India’s largest e-commerce giant Flipkart has received corporate agency license from IRDAI on September 26 and will soon start distribution of insurance policies. IRDAI has given composite license to Flipkart that allows the company to sell insurance policies of three life, three non-life and three stand-alone health insurance policies.
Flipkart will mainly face competition from banks, as most of the banks are corporate agents. Currently, there are over 400 corporate agents in India.
A newspaper report published in ‘The Economic Times’, says that Flipkart has partnered Bajaj Allianz General Insurance to offer customised insurance solutions to power its mobile phone protection programme for all leading mobile phone brands that are sold on its platform.
To begin with, Flipkart is said to target its sellers to distribute financial products.
Chinese e-commerce giant 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.
Other e-commerce giants already own stake in online distribution and robo advisory firms e.g. Amazon in BankBazaar and Snapdeal in Rupeepower.
Recently, One97 Communications more popularly known as Paytm Money received the corporate agency license to solicit insurance policies. In fact, the company has started its mutual fund distribution business.
