Flipkart set for financial services foray

For instance, customers will be able to buy a comprehensive protection plan for their smartphones right on Flipkart and sellers will be able to insure their products against damage in the reverse shipping process.

Garikipati said while micro-insurance built around e-commerce would be a start, Flipkart had plans to quickly enter the general and life insurance space as well. Even when it does this, it will stick to curating a select few policies rather than becoming an aggregator like PolicyBazaar, BankBazaar or CoverFox.

Flipkart will launch its first few products in the financial services space in the next three months and will target all three core areas it has identified - consumer lending, vendor lending and insurance. The company has already identified three partners for powering consumer lending but did not disclose their names.

“Even within the Flipkart ecosystem, we have a phenomenal opportunity. The focus here is to tap this latent captive demand, which is an opportunity worth billions of dollars in terms of consumer financing and the same applies for commercial lending as well. This will remain our focus for the next couple of years,” said Garikipati.

Amazon, the chief rival of Flipkart in India, is also mulling an entry into the financial services space largely to cater to the lack of consumers’ access to credit. In the US, the company has taken big steps to enter the financial services space through partnerships, sending banks and other financial institutions in the country into a tizzy, expecting competition from Amazon.

For India, Amit Agarwal, country head at Amazon, did not divulge the details of how Amazon would solve the issue of lack of access to credit. In a recent interview with Business Standard, he said, “If you don’t really have a financial institution that can give you credit, then we will give you credit, because we know you so much more because you come to us every day.”