SmartKompare-a startup that aims to help its users to find best financial products from a sea of options launches today in Dhaka. The startup, graduated recently from first batch of Founder Institute Dhaka, will let people to compare financial products from several financial institutions and choose the best. The service is simple: finding best loans, deposits, credit cards, and insurances is difficult, what SmartKompare does is it aggregates information about financial products from all possible sources and put it in order. Once you are looking for a loan or credit card, you go to SmartKompare website, enter your information and find comparison among products.
“Financial decisions are important, every day we make hundreds of small and big these decisions” -says Ron Mahbub, Co-founder of SmartKompare, -“but there is no place where you can go and find information related to financial products. Furthermore, banks and other financial institutions seldom update their websites with latest information. It complicates one’s decision. SmartKomapre wants to address this pain point and helps people to make better decisions while choosing financial products.”
As it beings its journey SmartKompare will provide information and comparison service for personal loan for time being and will include more products like deposits, credit cards, insurances, home, car loans, SME loans etc in the future.
For a business like SmartKompare, making money is difficult since you are offering your core service for free. But internet has changed the game for once and all: today free makes the best business model. SmartKompare aims to become a platform over the time. For making money it will provide loan sanctioning related services to personal loan seekers, like preparing docs, for a nominal fees and once they add more loans like that of SMEs they will offer larger array of services. Furthermore, the startup will look into advertising like featured products and deals with the financial service providers over the time.
According to BB the market size for loan and deposit was USD $162 billion in 2014 and, 4% of which is retail loan and deposit. SmartKompare aims to work in this retail area. “The number of people using credit cards and paying online is in the rise, says Ron, it means more people will be choosing credit cards in coming days. That’s an opportunity we want to tap into”.
This is understandable. Internet penetration in Bangladesh is in the rise; more people will be purchasing and paying online in coming days. It means more people will be using credit card and financial products. SmartKompare wants to be there to serve this large pool of people to make right decisions every day.
