Apparel April 2019 Apparel April 2019 issue | Page 108

FYI
EBIXCASH WORLD MONEY EXPLORES OVERSEAS EXPANSION ACROSS
MAJOR MARKETS
EbixCash World Money (erstwhile CentrumDirect
Limited) is currently exploring overseas expansion
across major markets. Mr T C Guruprasad, CEO
& Managing Director, EbixCash World Money
Limited, said, ‘‘EbixCash World Money is going
to be international very soon; we are trying to set
up offices and counters at the airport locations in
Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai to start with.
We are bidding for overseas locations for airport
slots. Hong Kong and Dubai should happen by
the next quarter.’’
Additionally, on the domestic front, EbixCash
World Money will be adding two to three airport
locations to its fold from the current 26. ‘‘We are
predominately present in 55-60 cities in India,
and 26 airports. We will be adding two to three
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more airports that we are bidding for. Also,
round the corner is the opening of the counter
at the greenfield airport of Kannur, which will
be operational soon. We have already signed
a contract for five years with Kannur Airport.
Moreover, we have won the bid and will start
operations at Kochi Airport soon.’’
Elaborating on the strategy to grow
the business after Ebix Group acquired
CentrumDirect Limited, Guruprasad said, ‘‘Our
major focus is on cross-selling in terms of
corporate solutions, inter alia involving corporate
gifting, expenses management by weaving in
foreign exchange, and travel services. For retail
B2B network, we are empowering our retail
partners with more and more products across
the financial services and payments space to
increase their customer stickiness and goodwill
with end customers.” Moreover, with respect to
online strategy, the company is integrating its
digital foreign exchange and Via.com teams to
make one unified team to drive digital strategy.
“We are looking at integrating teams in terms of
SEOs, Google spends, etc. Digitally, we will have
only one team handling all the business.” All the
back-end support for Ebix will be based in India
at the Mumbai, Bengaluru and Noida offices.
Commenting on the benefits of the acquisition,
Guruprasad said that Ebix enjoys a brick-and-
mortar presence of over 50 offices across
Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, New Zealand,
Singapore, the US and UK markets. “We can
plug and play the locations where Ebix Group has
a footprint for our benefit. The foreign exchange
business is predominantly based on how one can
source foreign currency in various markets. We
want to ensure in the forex space, we continue to
grow over market share.”
As far as the corporate travel segment is
concerned, Guruprasad said that there was a lull
for the last three years. “But we are now seeing
an upward trend and in the past three months,
large corporations have signed with us. The result
of this will be available when we close the balance
sheet in March 2019.” Another area of interest for
EbixCash is the travel insurance business. “There
is immense potential to grow the travel insurance
vertical. We want to try and grow that business.”
Post the acquisition, the process for change
in the brand architecture of EbixCash is already
done and will be visible soon.