Financial marketplace BankBazaar.com, which offers savings products, access to insurance policies and loans, saw faster growth in the car-loan and home-loan categories in 2017 than in unsecured products, co-Founder and chief executive Adhil Shetty told Shritama Bose. The company has seen revenues rise 129% over the previous year, while costs have grown at a far slower 27%, largely on account of hiring, he added. Edited excerpts:

What has business been like in FY17?

This has been a year of growth for us from an organic perspective. For example, this year, compared to the same period last year, we’ve grown revenue about 129%. Interestingly, the cost has gone up only 27%. The reason that’s happening is we are growing organically without having to constantly spend on advertising. Also, we are seeing a lot of consumers repeated across products.

How has the loans segment been doing?

Loans continue to do very well and is still the largest product among our portfolio. We are seeing quite aggressive growth in terms of transactions on our side, both in car loans and home loans. That might sound a little surprising, but very interestingly, in the online market, we actually see home loans and car loans delivering the biggest growth in transactions, compared to last year. That could be because a lot more people are savvy and are coming online and applying, compared to going offline. So even though the overall market might not be growing very quickly, the fastest online growth rates, ironically, are in these two products.

Would you say that these categories grew faster than unsecured products this year?

In terms of growth rates, they did, but the unsecured product category is the largest product category. Car loans, home loans and insurance grew much faster, but they had a lower base.

Between fixed deposits and mutual funds, which did better in 2017?

I think the mutual fund campaign around “Sahi hai” has given a great fillip to the industry. Also, the mutual fund industry is geared up for going 100% paperless. Because they are so prepared, we see much, much higher growth rates in mutual funds, compared to fixed deposits. Fixed deposits, again, is an industry that’s starting to go paperless, but a lot of work remains to be done and readymade APIs (application programming interfaces) are not available.

Give us a sense of your growth in visitors and their geographical skew?

This October, we did 23 million visitors, as opposed to last October, when there were 8.5 million visitors. Growth has happened because consumers are organically starting to use their mobile phones to buy all products, not just for e-commerce. We don’t have to spend much on marketing, and my 27% cost increase has come mostly from hiring. The top 15 cities account for 70% and the rest for 30%. But, again, we clearly see a trend in here, which is that the smaller cities’ growth rate is faster than the top 15 cities. Also, 75% of our business is on the mobile phone, as against 50% a couple of years ago. What’s happening is, in a lot of these non-metro cities, people are not coming to us from a desktop or a laptop. We figured that most of the time, these people don’t even use those devices. They are quite comfortable using their mobile phone to access the internet.

Do you see an opportunity in the e-KYC (Know Your Customer) space?

The government of India has already built great digital infrastructure, the India Stack. What we now need to do is to ensure that all industries consume eKYC. For banking, eKYC is today allowed for loans up to Rs 60,000, but the average loan size on the internet is Rs 3 lakh. So, the Rs 60,000 cap is too low. We have asked the finance ministry officials in a meeting to urge RBI to relook at the limit.

What is your growth outlook for 2018?

I have promised the board that we’ll scale up to about 35 million visitors by March 2018. We started last March with 14 million visitors a month. When I do my budget forecast for next year, I’m sure it’s going to be at least as aggressive as it has been this year, which is at least 120% growth, but that projection happens only when our budget gets approved next March.

What is your timeline for achieving break-even?

Initially, we had said that we’d get to EBITDA break-even by March 2018. Once we received funding from Experian, we decided to go a little more aggressive both on India and the international market, because of which the break-even will get pushed by about six months. So currently we are targeting September 2018.