If you are familiar with Agoda (a hotel comparison site) and Skyscanner (flights, hotel, car rental comparison site), then you must know that this is the way now to find out how products and services fare across different providers instead of going to each and every provider. Comparison sites allow you to just go to one site and see how different products from different providers fare when placed side by side. These sites are usually independent, free to users, and objective.
Now, meet the leading financial comparison website in the country – MoneyMax.ph.
At the moment, MoneyMax.ph has comparison data on car insurance, credit cards, broadband, housing loans, and personal loans.
Why does MoneyMax.ph even want to do this in the Philippines?
Patrick Lynch of MoneyMax.ph said that the Philippines had demographics that showed the potential and the need for more financial product comparison:
* Only 27% of the population has a checking account
* An inflexible credit bureau excludes many
* Across all demographics, financial literacy was poor
Then, juxtaposed with that was the reality of the high cost of financial services:
* Filipinos pay PhP 15.5-B in car insurance premiums
* Monthly interest rates can be very high
* There’s a lack of price competition from providers
How does MoneyMax.ph work?
MoneyMax.ph aims to save people time and money by gathering all the information needed so one can make an informed decision. The site gathers the information and presents them side by side on the site so that it is a lot easier to compare across products. This makes it easy to see the differences between the highest and lowest quotes and everything in between. Consumers save precious research time as well as additional time one would need to go from provider to provider gathering the very same information. MoneyMax.ph Advisers are even available and on call via email or phone to answer questions from users of the site.
Just as an example, if you were trying to compare interest rates and amortizations on housing loans, you would use their on-site filter, fill in a desired loan amount, loan period and property value and you may find results like these:
Beyond just providing information, another advocacy of MoneyMax.ph is to EDUCATE consumers. So they partner with personal finance experts to provide money saving tips and detailed guides on financial products. Under their “Get Informed” tab, consumers can read articles by finance experts and select bloggers as well as read general articles on product reviews, personal finance, and more.
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| Get Informed tab |
As part of this financial literacy advocacy, MoneyMax.ph was also a sponsor of the recently concluded Family FQ Workshop with the Fausto family.
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| Rose Fausto at the Family FQ Workshop |
The website is still evolving so expect more products and improvements down the road. Meanwhile, it’s great that we finally have something like this to jumpstart financial literacy in the country. The more informed finance-wise most Filipinos are, the better positioned we will be to really develop a savings and investing mindset. A country with majority of its citizens in investing mode will surely become progressive.