The idea for BankBazaar, an online financial marketplace, began with a problem its founders experienced themselves. In 2007, co-founders Arjun Shetty and Rati Shetty were looking for a home loan and found it difficult to compare interest rates, processing fees, foreclosure charges and the different rules followed by banks. The experience led to a simple question: could a digital platform make financial products easier to compare and buy?
They took the idea to their friend Adhil Shetty, now co-founder and CEO, who was then working with Deloitte in the US. He had wanted to build something in India and the concept clicked. Within a month, he quit his job and returned to Chennai, where he began approaching banks and potential team members. “When Arjun and Rati came to me with the BankBazaar concept, it didn’t just make sense, it clicked,” he said.
The founders did not have much to show the banks at the time. They simply walked in and asked whether they would partner with them. The response was mixed. “We were the consumers; we had experienced the problem ourselves,” Adhil said, describing the approach as a “well-informed leap of faith”. The exercise also revealed an important constraint: even when customers could start a loan application online, banks still required an in-person meeting. That offline step remained a bottleneck for years.
The company was incorporated and spent about six months building the platform before going live in February 2008. In the early days, there were only three or four people sharing a cubicle. Its first proper office in Chennai had a single custom-made wooden table that could seat 50 people. Everyone worked around it, with no private offices or functional silos.
Watching the platform go live gave the team its first real proof that the idea could work.
“That feeling of seeing something you built actually work is impossible to replicate,” Adhil said. The first capital came from personal money put in by a former boss and a close friend, followed by institutional investment from Chennai-based AV Thomas Infotech. BankBazaar has since raised $134 million across 11 rounds and counts Peak XV Partners, Amazon and Experian among its backers. In FY25, the company reported total revenue of Rs 254 crore, operating
revenue of Rs `249 crore and an adjusted Ebitda profit of Rs 4 crore. Its business has expanded beyond comparing loans and other financial products to include co-branded credit cards and Credit Strong, a subscription service that uses AI-generated personalised advice to help consumers improve their credit scores.
Execution, however, was harder than the original idea. “Power would go out. We needed a voltage stabiliser. The stabiliser had its own issues, so we needed a transformer,” Adhil recalled. The experience forced the team to build technology, operations and basic infrastructure at the same time, and taught them that execution in India often requires solving problems from first principles.
The company also had to change its business model. Initially, it earned money for sending customers to banks, irrespective of whether those leads converted. It later moved towards annuity and co-brand programmes, aligning BankBazaar’s revenue more closely with the bank’s profitability. The founders also underestimated how much of the customer journey would remain offline. The introduction of video KYC during the Covid period, which removed the need for an in-person meeting, therefore became a significant shift.
The broader idea was to make financial buying less opaque for consumers, but BankBazaar’s role evolved as the ecosystem changed. The company says it worked with the industry and policymakers on digital onboarding and video KYC, while continuing to build products around consumer engagement. Today, its proposition is less about simply comparing products and more about helping consumers discover, access and manage financial products digitally. That shift has shaped its evolution from a comparison site into a digital financial marketplace.