Moneysupermarket - CCC Financial |
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Moneysupermarket.com was launched in December 1999 and our purpose in life is to make it easy for you to compare personal finance products and services in the market so that you can: find the best and most competitively priced product for your needs; buy it online; and, save money. Tens of thousands of people use the site each day to research and buy the best value financial products available in the UK today. We also provide our services to most of the UK's leading web sites including most of the Internet Service Providers, Newspapers, Search Engines and other leading web brands. Yahoo, Wanadoo, Tiscali, BTopenworld, Financial Times, The Times, The Daily Mail, Lycos and many more are all partners of ours. In addition, over 100 UK banks, building societies and insurance companies have a trading relationship with moneysupermarket.com. Moneysupermarket.com Limited is an appointed representative of Moneysupermarket.com Financial Group Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA FRN 303190). Below is a question and answer section to give you a feel for the services provided by moneysupermarket.com and the team behind it. This summary was written in August 2002 and updated in October 2004. 1. About the Company and its Management Team Who owns moneysupermarket.com? Moneysupermarket.com is part of Moneysupermarket.com Financial Group Limited, a Chester based company that is 100% privately owned by the Group Directors of which the majority of shares are controlled by Simon Nixon (Chief Executive) and Duncan Cameron. Is moneysupermarket.com an Internet start-up? No. Our parent company is Moneysupermarket.com Financial Group Limited (MSFGL). MSFGL also trades as Mortgage 2000 which is well known in the financial services industry as it sells mortgage sourcing data to mortgage brokers and Independent Financial Advisors throughout the UK, over 10,000 of which access our data on a daily basis. Mortgage 2000 has, at the time of writing, existed for around 12 years so it is well established as a personal finance data company. The information that we hold on almost every financial product in the UK is also used by many of the financial institutions to monitor competitor activity and help them design better products for their customers. How successful is moneysupermarket.com? "...over £2 billion (loans) ...a million credit cards ..." Very successful. In 2002 we sourced over £2 billion in personal loan lending alone. We generated over a million credit card applications and tens of thousands of other products such as secured loans, mortgages and insurance. These figures were doubled in 2003. You can save substantial sums of money by simply using the site to compare the products on the market and buy the best in the market for your particular needs. For example a low cost personal loan or a better rate of interest on your savings account. moneysupermarket.com has won and been nominated for a number of industry awards and we are frequently referred to in the national press and have often been praised as the best personal finance 'aggregator' site in various magazine user guides. Our key staff are quoted in the personal finance pages of the newspapers every week as 'industry commentators' and we have been featured on TV and radio examples being BBC 'It's your money'; Breakfast TV; Radio 4 'Moneybox'; Radio 5 Live and many others. Why is it successful? "...it will save you money and it's easy to use..." First and foremost we provide a service that is beneficial to consumers. It will save you money and it's easy to use. Although personal finance can appear a deathly dull subject, saving money matters. The difference between finding the best and worst mortgage, loan, credit card, insurance, pension, annuity deal makes a huge difference - over an adult lifetime this can amount to tens of thousands of £s. Don't under-estimate the savings that can be made. Simply switching an average size mortgage from one lender to another (without even moving house) may save so much it'll pay for a family holiday in Florida! See how much you can save by looking at the most competitive deals in the market and comparing them against your current provider. The other factors that make moneysupermarket.com successful are: Distribution - most of the big web sites in the UK use our comparison tables. Currently we have over 150 web sites using our tools. Virtually all our software is produced by our own staff and we restrict consultancy and expensive third party services to an absolute minimum. Basically we 'stick to the knitting'. Accuracy of information. We employ a team of nearly 20 researchers that contact the product providers to make sure the data is up to date and accurate. The web site is updated daily and it is not uncommon to find that the data is more accurate on moneysupermarket.com than the providers own website! Hard to believe, but we have seen this on countless occasions. Where is moneysupermarket.com based and how many staff are employed? We are based in Chester and currently employ about 300 staff. The company has grown rapidly over a 12 year period and even at the height of the dot com gloom we carried on growing at a steady rate and we continue to grow taking on about 10 new staff each month. If you live in Chester, Wrexham or North Wales it is worth supplying a CV if you are interested in a job with moneysupermarket.com we often have vacancies for IT, admin and sales staff (just send to the Personnel Manager at our address at the bottom of this page). Who are the key members of the management team? All of the staff make a valuable contribution to the business. The senior management team is made up of the following individuals: Simon Nixon Chief Executive - Co-owner Paul Doughty Chief Financial Officer Stuart Glendinning Marketing Director Richard Mason Sales Director Sean Thweny Business Development Director Other Directors within the Group are: Jamie Stobbs, the Operations Director for the Mortgage 2000 Group and Sean Hornsby, Managing Director of the Mortgage 2000 Group. The Compare and Buy Tables What do the comparison tables do? We decipher the key requirements of a product and then present the information in a way that it can be sensibly compared so that you can easily find the best product to meet your needs and save you money. We endeavour to compare the whole market. There are literally thousands of mortgages listed and many hundreds of loans, credit cards and other products etc. Personal finance websites can broadly work in one of three ways: 'Limited comparison' - this might more accurately be described as 'loaded comparison' or even 'completely biased comparison'! This, sadly, represents the majority where the web site only shows the products where they are paid by the provider or 'skews' the results so that the paid for products top results tables irrespective of whether or not they are 'best buys'! A quick glance at some of the sites on Google bring up some laughable comparisons 'Passive reproduction' - this is where a site reproduces most of the deals available in the market irrespective of whether there is a financial reward or not. This is better than above but not as good as 'Proactive intervention' (see below) which is what moneysupermarket.com does. 'Proactive intervention' - this is the practice that moneysupermarket.com follows. Our practice is to display 'whole of market' but also to lobby providers to offer 'exclusives' to our users. This frequently produces a situation where every standard product is on our site plus some unique - and even better - exclusives. As moneysupermarket.com is the biggest personal finance 'aggregator' site by both user numbers and volume of applications sourced we negotiate on our customers behalf in much the same way as Tesco or Adsa will demand better deals of grocery suppliers. For much of the year you will find 'market best' deals in terms of the lowest loan rates or longest 0% balance transfer deals on moneysupermarket.com. Just one of many examples - moneysupermarket.com was the first website in the UK to offer a credit card with 0% for 18 months for balanced transfers. Sadly, even those websites that adopt a 'passive reproduction' of products in the market will not display deals available through moneysupermarket.com even when they are markedly better than the standard products in the market. As a consequence of negotiating with providers to get you (and us) a better deal there are some occasions where we will hold back promoting a providers product until the negotiations are concluded. This is an infrequent occurence but we are convinced that our policy of employing individuals from the bank and building society industry who use their knowledge to push for new products and object to some 'industry tricks of the trade' best serves our customers interests. Our ideal situation and the goal we constantly chase is to have every provider listed and for our users to be able to apply with each one through the site. How do we make our money? Over 90% of our revenue comes from the introduction fees payable by the product providers when you buy a loan, credit card, current account etc through the site. If the card is sourced through moneysupermarket.com we retain all the commission and if it is sourced though one of our 'portal partners', say, Lycos, then much of the commission will be passed on to them with a proportion being retained by moneysupermarket.com. Only a small proportion of our revenue comes from advertising. If you use the site to find the best product for your needs but do not apply through the site but simply go to the provider's web site and apply there instead, moneysupermarket.com will earn nothing. Consequently hopefully you will not think it too 'cheeky' of us to ask you, where possible, to apply through moneysupermarket.com. It is easy for you to see which providers pay moneysupermarket.com for business that we introduce. All those providers that have an 'apply' icon next to them offer payment to moneysupermarket.com for business sourced. All those without an 'apply' icon do not pay a fee to moneysupermarket.com. Although we want everyone to trade with us so that you can apply for everyone via our site it does at least give you some re-assurance that we are displaying 'whole of market'. The best comparison is to go to the full results table. We normally show a selection of 'best buys' on the relevant home page but it is often the case that this will be made up of 'best buys' of providers trading with moneysupermarket.com. It is also the case that some providers will ask to be included in the full results only. This will normally be to 'manage' or 'slow down' the flow of applications e.g. for processing purposes. What's in a name? The good thing about our name is that it gives us a clear sense of purpose. We want to become the place you come to research and source all your financial needs. We still have some way to go but we are developing our channels as fast as we can without compromising the quality. We already have many product channels to help you get the best out of your finances. |
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CCC's Mortgage Providers |