PhonePe turning into super app: Forays into insurance segment targeting travellers

Walmart-owned digital payments company PhonePe on Thursday launched an insurance offering in partnership with Bajaj Allianz General Insurance. The company has started with travel insurance for leisure and business travellers to buy while travelling abroad across 220 countries offering sum insured of up to $1 million. PhonePe, which competes with Alibaba-backed Paytm, Google Pay, etc in hyper-competitive India’s digital payments market that is likely to become $1 trillion in size by 2023 as per Credit Suisse, claimed to be India’s first such digital payment platform to launch international travel insurance.

“While we were evaluating different products, we found that in insurance products, the adoption of online medium in travel insurance is already quite high. Customers buying insurance on their own is becoming a usual practice. With 70 per cent of travel booking happening online, we believe this category is ready to move from web to mobile,” said Gunjan Ghai, Head of Insurance, Phonepe told Financial Express Online.