Via, the online travel platform that was recently acquired by US company Ebix at the end of October 2017 is reportedly seeing the successive departures of its senior leader members; notably, Chief Business Officer, Paroma Chatterjee and Chief Finance Officer, Sujit Neha according to anonymous sources close to the company.
Ebix, acquired Via for $75 million and are now envisaging using is workforce to expand its core payments and remittance relating to travels with its insurance businesses. Ebix and the Bombay Stock Exchange recently agreed on a Memorandum of Understanding on establishing a jointly an insurance distribution network in India.
According to anonymous sources, the departures of the two senior executive is directly related to Via change of power. Unlike its rivals MakeMyTrip and Yatra, Via relied hugely on the set of offline agents distributed over its areas of operations. However, Ebix expressed the desire to use Via to support the US company’s core business instead of staying in the business to customer flight and hotel bookings sector. Ebix has a strong corporate business for travel bookings and has been acquiring several companies before acquiring Via.
Many worry that the leave of senior executives could have an overall negative impact on the whole Via staff team which currently counts 400 employees.
Throwback to the Ebix-Via acquisition
Back in October 2017, Ebix Inc., stated that one of its Singapore subsidiaries came to terms with online travel and assisted e-commerce exchange, Via.com to acquire the company for a reported fee of $75 Million. This marked one of many acquisitions made by Ebix over a small period of time as the US-based company was looking for strategic acquisitions within the budget of $200 Mn.
Back then, Chief Growth Officer of EbixCash, Bhavik Vasa claimed that the acquisition of Via by Ebix was carried out to boost the on-demand software and e-commerce platform’s presence in the travel market segment while also providing geographic expansion.
“Travel is one of the most emerging sectors in the country. We were already present in the bill and digital payments, money transfer and in the travel segment. This will accelerate our presence in the travel space,” he said.
Via also provided the opportunity for Ebix to step in the Southeast Asian market, “which matches our aspirations to be able to take our entire platform of EbixCash global,” Bhavik Vasa said back then. “This would help us fast forward our footprint in emerging markets of South-East Asia.”
Via boasted a huge network of agents over Southeast Asia and Middle-east, more precisely over 85,000 agents in India, 14,700 agents in Indonesia, 9,900 agents in the Philippines, 600 agents in Singapore and 350 agents in the UAE and Oman.