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Informist, Friday, Sept. 25, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – PB Fintech Ltd. is looking to extract fees for the services it provides outside of insurance distribution to mitigate the potential hit to its revenues from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India's proposed overhaul of distribution, the company's management told analysts in a conference call Thursday. The proposed insurance regulatory changes would not have a major impact on the net present value of its life insurance business but threaten 33-40% of its revenues from general insurance distribution, the market leader said in an exchange filing Friday.

 

"Historically, our effort has been to be aggressive to drive growth for the overall industry," Yashish Dahiya, co-founder and chief executive officer, said on the conference call. "However, given the new economics, there may be opportunities for rationalisation there, and we will look at that." The management guided for the financial year 2027-28 (Apr-Mar) to be one of challenges but hoped to figure out ways to deal with the regulations by FY29. No impact is seen in FY27.

 

The company's stock plummeted after IRDAI put out a consultation paper earlier this week. Among other measures to overhaul the insurance distribution framework, the regulator seeks to limit the commissions earned by insurance distributors. If the IRDAI proposal is implemented in toto, it could result in a 30% hit to the company's core online insurance revenue in FY28, Motilal Oswal said in a note after the analyst call.

 

The squeeze in margins would force the company to cut down outreach efforts into less-lucrative parts of the country, the management said. The capital allocation will also be focused on the core position of PB Fintech rather than on newer verticals such as offshore businesses. Dahiya said the IRDAI proposal on distribution reform came without any consultation with distributors.

 

PB Fintech could reduce its brand spending and advertising to cut costs while going slow on some facets of its sales and customer support. The company is in the early stages of exploring ways to get service revenues for these activities. The management was optimistic the proposed IRDAI norms allow for the quality of business created to be given value, which may lead to a lesser impact on its PolicyBazaar vertical. It is awaiting more clarity from the regulator and industry participants on facets of the final norms, the management said.

 

PB Fintech is also exploring synergies across life and health insurance distribution to potentially mitigate costs. Going forward, if the norms are implemented as is, the financial technology company may choose to optimise for cost rather than growth by trimming hiring and optimising personnel, Sarbvir Singh, chief executive officer at Policybazaar.com, said. In an interview before the regulatory changes, Singh had said that protection products accounted for more than 70% of core revenue and health and term insurance would drive growth. IRDAI has proposed that distribution commissions should not be linked to volume sales and instead to the difficulty of selling the policy, with incentives for broader market penetration. 

 

"I just want to be very clear that we are going to make no knee-jerk decisions, there will be no mass layoffs of any kind, we run the company for long-term growth and we will calibrate that growth to the new reality, but at no point are we going to make decisions which will hurt our colleagues in any sort of unfair way," Singh said.

 

The company's revenues are broadly split evenly between life and general insurance on the distribution side, according to the management. The price benefits to customers from the proposed norms will add to PB Fintech's revenues and lessen the impact. Even proposed changes to the regulation of point-of-sale personnel could hurt the top line but potentially improve the bottom line, the management said, though the proposed guidelines were "a little extreme" and may be loosened in the final norms.

 

Friday, shares of the PB Fintech ended at INR 1,166.00 apiece on the National Stock Exchange, down over 3% from Thursday. The stock has fallen nearly 40% since the consultation paper was released. For the June quarter, the company had posted a consolidated net profit of INR 1.63 billion on revenues of INR 18.88 billion.  End

 

Reported by Aaryan Khanna

Edited by Rajeev Pai

 

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