With almost a years’ worth of mileage on the Smart Money People clock, we wanted to share a little more about what is under our hood.

It starts with our mission

From the very outset, our mission has been to use the power of customer reviews to help increase trust and transparency in financial services. It’s this mission that drove us to launch Smart Money People, and today it motivates us to drive the business forward…and yes, the car analogy is being stretched a little thinly now!

Why reviews?

Well put simply, reviews are a user-friendly medium. Customers traditionally find the financial services industry difficult to engage with, and therefore reviews, when executed well, can provide a helpful level of guidance. In fact, in a survey we carried out earlier this year, up to 87% of all consumers told us that they were influenced by reviews. We deliver a better review product because we understand the complexity of customer interactions in financial services, can deliver more insight and are motivated by our mission.

How much insight does a 5* overall rating provide?

In truth, not much. That’s why our reviews provide us with four lenses:

1: Brand-level

We now have over 400 UK & Ireland financial brands on our platform…from big banks and insurance companies, to your local building society and the emerging alternative finance players. This provides us with a insight across financial services.

2: Product-level

All of our reviews are at the product level and capture a mix of performance and regulatory data points. We combine this structured insight with our free text field to help provide more intelligence behind the overall rating.

3: Customer profiles

We partner with organisations to provide them with an intelligent review platform. However, we are also building and engaging a Smart Money People community who are actively reviewing multiple products with multiple providers. This is were the smart stuff really begins, and it’s this additional lens that unlocks a number of exciting possibilities.

4: Deeper, contextualised insight

We blend our review insight with other sources to create a rich live source of insight. Ultimately, each lens helps us to build what is a unique customer insight proposition for the financial services industry.

The benefits

The organisations we work with can use this insight across their organisations, but broadly, Smart Money People delivers benefits under the following categories:

  • Regulatory compliance
  • Marketing
  • Customer experience

A better solution

Surveys and one-off telephone exercises have long been the bread and butter toolkit of insight and benchmarking activities. Our reviews are collected 365 days a year and 24 hours a day. When users write their reviews they’re reviewing as they have something to say… not because someone’s disturbed their dinner! In addition, the number one reason consumers give us for wanting to write a review is to help other consumers by sharing their experience. A survey response that falls into a black box fails to deliver this.

Our approach

We work in partnership with organisations to develop and implement an adoption plan that can be live within a matter of weeks. In fact, our proposition can be cost neutral for many organisations.

Find out more

We’re a friendly bunch and always happy to discuss what we can offer in more detail. So why not reach out to us:

Michael: [email protected]

Scott: [email protected]

We plan to share some of our insight on our LinkedIn page over the next few months. You can follow us on  LinkedIn today.