Ebix's Raina has acquired a staggering 27 companies in India, and turned around 13 distressed companies overall, in a bid to add heft and transform EbixCash into a diversified fintech conglomerate
Robin Raina, Chairman & CEO of Ebix Inc. and founder of the Robin Raina Foundation at his office in Greater Noida, UP, India. Image: Amit Verma
It was the third week of September 2017. Robin Raina was in Atlanta, US. After a seemingly endless day, the chairman, president and CEO of Nasdaq-listed Ebix was getting ready to shut down his laptop at 3 am. A minute later, his mobile buzzed. “Paytm is in talks to buy Via.com,” read a message from one of his friends in India. Raina, who joined Delphi Information Systems as vice president in 1997, and is now the largest shareholder of the company with 28.4 percent, became restless. “Can you get me the contact number of Vani Kola?” he texted back.
Five months back, in May 2017, the Indian-origin entrepreneur had made his first bold bet in the country when he bought 80 percent in ItzCash, a leading payment solutions exchange and a leader in the prepaid cards and bill payments space, reportedly for Rs 800 crore. With a retail distribution network of over 75,000 outlets spread across 3,000 cities, 1,500 corporate partners and 75 million customers, ItzCash was processing over 6 lakh transactions per day. The acquisition, Raina underlines, made sense. “Its network and reach meant that we could dominate from day one,” he says.
The acquisition of Via.com would have provided an opportunity to dominate the travel space too. The company had 14,700 agents in Indonesia, 9,900 in Philippines, 600 in Singapore and 350 in the UAE and Oman. It was in India, though, where Via had its biggest assets: 85,000 agents. Buying Via.com also meant adding over a lakh retail outlets to EbixCash, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ebix. The master of buyouts—Raina had snapped up over two dozen companies across the world to add heft to Ebix’s global play, knew that to take care of the plateauing growth, India was the land of salvation. “It was not just an opportunity. I knew it would be a life-changing one,” he recounts.
By 2017, Ebix—Delphi changed its name to Ebix in 2003—had emerged as a strong global player by providing software and ecommerce services to insurance, financial, e-governance and health care industries. Raina could not afford to let go any interesting buyout opportunity in India. He called up Kola—the managing director at Kalaari Capital was one of the backers of Via—at 3.30 am US time. “I don’t think the deal is likely to happen,” he said. “Even if it happens, it may take months,” Raina continued, requesting for an update on the company financials.