Member Article

Teesside business launches world’s first crowdsourcing review site

An online review system ranking financial services organisations and products including credit cards, bank loans and mortgages based on customer experience, has launched on Teesside.

SmartMoneyPeople.com, the first site of its kind, has been created to throw a spotlight on the financial services sector and make it more customer friendly, through an online review system.

Using a similar model to TripAdvisor, the site will help the public break down a difficult to understand and sometimes overtly complex industry.

Developed using seed capital from North East fund TwentyThreeMiles, SmartMoneyPeople.com is the brainchild of former Deloitte financial services consultant Mike Fotis and the first investment from Teesside fund TwentyThreeMiles.

Following the credit crisis, Mike experienced how rapidly the industry was changing, with increased regulation, the growth of digital channels, new business models and new market entrants.

Despite this large scale transformation, consumer confidence in financial services is at an all-time low, an issue Mike hopes SmartMoneyPeople.com will help to remedy.

Users are invited to log into the review site, which can also be accessed through Facebook, to share their customer experiences.

To incentivise their support, users are rewarded with badges, including ‘Innovator’ and ‘Leader’ for their time. Proprietary data analytics have been developed to help identify trends and provide real customer insight, including benchmarking organisations and products based on consumer feedback.

Founder and CEO of SmartMoneyPeople.com, Mike Fotis, said: “People power is definitely on the up - in today’s society we want to crowdsource opinions from our peers to ensure we are making the right choices; whether booking a holiday, going out for dinner or choosing an insurance policy.

“Through SmartMoneyPeople.com we can harness the power of our customer experiences to help bring a new level of trust and transparency to the biggest industry in the UK.

“As an independent start-up, SmartMoneyPeople.com is well placed to help make the financial services industry work better for everybody, and empower consumers to find the right product that is appropriate to their needs.”

Director of TwentyThreeMiles, Paul Callaghan, said: “This review site has the potential to be an important part of the financial services industry ecosystem.

“Over the past few months we have been working closely with Mike to develop and launch SmartMoneyPeople.com and we’re overjoyed to have such a promising technological innovation operating out of our Teesside base.”

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