Every time someone in India buys, renews, or files a claim on a commercial insurance policy, Gagan Sethi wants that transaction to run through his company’s systems within three years, whether the customer ever knows Ebix Technologies exists or not.
That is the scale of ambition behind his second stint as CEO of Ebix, which builds the behind-the-scenes technology that lets insurers, brokers, and agents buy and sell policies digitally across 12 countries.
Sethi has spent more than 30 years climbing through the ranks at Ebix, first as Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, then as Global Chief Technology Officer for over two decades, before taking over as CEO.
He describes the current job as less about building new technology and more about getting the company to actually execute on what it has already built.
From legacy maintenance to aggressive modernisation
“What is different this time is the operational and execution focus. We are no longer just maintaining a legacy portfolio; we are aggressively modernizing it,” says the Atlanta-based CEO.
In practice, that has meant merging teams that were spread across different countries, cutting down layers of leadership, and adding AI tools on top of systems that, in some cases, have been running quietly in the background of the insurance industry for years.
Ebix’s global headquarters moved from Atlanta to India after the company’s parent, Eraaya Lifespaces, completed its acquisition in June 2024. Sethi is quick to clarify what that actually changed and what it didn’t.
“It is not really a headquarters shift in terms of location but a shift from a public company in the US to an India-based parent holding company,” he said. What did change, he added, is that engineering, product, and support teams are now concentrated where the work already happens, which has meant faster product releases and quicker fixes when clients run into problems.
The 20 percent bet: enterprise clients and new marketplaces
Ebix Technologies is targeting over 20 percent annual growth in India over the next three years. Sethi breaks that down into two simple bets: selling more to the big insurers it already works with, and building new digital marketplaces that let smaller, regional players plug in too.
“We are seeing massive pull for our automated Risk and Compliance platforms and our wealth management suite. These aren’t just software sales; they are transactional, on-demand exchange models,” he said. In practical terms, that means insurers pay Ebix each time a transaction happens on its systems, rather than paying once for a piece of software and being done with it.
The growth push is also reaching regional brokers who are under pressure to go digital but lack the scale to build their own technology.
India already makes up close to half of Ebix’s global business. Rather than treating that as a reason to shift investment elsewhere, Sethi treats India as the testing ground for everything the company later sells abroad.
“We invest heavily in India as the foundational platform to build, refine, and stress-test products that we then export globally. The investment in Indian engineering directly improves the product quality we ship to other countries,” he said.
Sethi drew a comparison to the US, Australia, Latin America, and Europe, where Ebix competes for mid-sized brokers who feel underserved by older, slower software providers, the same pitch the company is making to regional players in India.
Just like UPI: Positioning as the ‘technology connector’ for IRDAI’s Insurance for All
Asked which regulatory shifts are shaping Ebix’s India roadmap, Sethi pointed squarely to the IRDAI’s “Insurance for All” mandate, and described in detail why the company is betting on it.
“We are building our roadmap directly around the IRDAI’s mandate of ‘Insurance for All’. This regulatory push to create a unified, open protocol for buying, selling, and servicing insurance is a structural shift similar to what UPI did for payments. We are positioning Ebix as the key technology connector for the industry, drawing on our vast experience running insurance exchanges across the globe. Any broker, agent, or carrier who wants to transact seamlessly on any platform will need the common platforms, data transaction standards and API plumbing, and that is our core strength. We are also aligning our underwriting and compliance engines with the regulator’s push for faster product filing and stricter data protection standards,” Sethi said.
In simpler terms, if regulators want a customer to be able to buy a policy from one company and file a claim through a completely different app, someone has to build the pipes that let those two systems talk to each other. Sethi wants someone to be Ebix.
That also shapes how the company deals with the wave of insurtech startups that have sprung up in India in recent years. Rather than compete with them, Sethi treats them as customers.
“Our partner model is simple: we provide the robust, enterprise-grade transaction rails, and they build niche, localized frontends on top of our APIs,” he said. In other words, the flashy app a customer sees on their phone might belong to a startup, but the systems processing the policy behind it could well be Ebix’s.
Mid-tier brokers in the US, Australia, Latin America, and Europe
Outside India, the pitch stays largely the same: go after mid-sized brokers that big legacy vendors have neglected.
In Australia, Sethi said Ebix’s exchange platforms already dominate, with long-standing ties to most major insurers. In the US, the focus has narrowed to two specific, unglamorous but essential jobs: proving that a business has valid insurance coverage, and handling the paperwork when a company outsources parts of its insurance administration.
Three years from now, Sethi wants the answer to be simple. “In three years, I want Ebix to be the default digital infrastructure behind every major commercial insurance transaction in the country. If a policy is issued, renewed, or processed, it should touch our code,” said Sethi, who holds an engineering degree in computer science and an MBA in information technology. Financially, he wants that scale to come with strong margins, not just volume.
The thing most likely to get in the way, he said, is not competition but plumbing: finding and training enough people fast enough, and getting old, slow-moving insurance companies to open up their systems for Ebix to plug into.
“If a carrier takes months to open up their database for an integration, our revenue cycle slows down,” he said. His answer is to lean harder on AI and pre-built APIs, so Ebix depends less on how quickly a client’s own IT team moves.
