After months in development mozo.com.au has launched to the Australian public, hoping to capitalise on the financial crisis and appeal to consumers looking to get a better deal.
Mozo competitor Ratecity scores banking products with Cannex star ratings. Mozo will instead rely on consumer feedback, and partnered with Roy Morgan to generate 3,000 initial consumer reviews and ratings of individual banks for the site.
Banks were rated on five categories: trust, customer service, convenience, product features, and rates and fees. Based on the initial batch of reviews Australia's favourite banks are Bendigo Bank, Members Equity, Bank of Queensland, Suncorp and BankWest. All regionals, and all at risk of, or already being swallowed up by larger competitors.
Probably the most unique feature of the site is the “Health check” tool that enables users to compare their existing bank products with those of competitors and work out whether they would benefit from switching.
Users can shortlist the products they are interested in and come back at a later stage when they are ready to purchase. Mozo will generate revenue from leads sent to financial institutions, and display advertising.
Mozo has also secured an Australian Financial Services Licence, making it easier for the group to compare and discuss deposit products – a definite advantage given the current strong industry competition for retail deposits.
The only obvious exclusion from the site is a discussion forum, something the journos behind fatcat.com.au have managed to pull off with moneyconfessions.com.au.
The combination of qualitative and quantitative data is a must in the current climate where consumers are seeking advice and perhaps a shoulder to cry on.
We’ll be watching the social networks closely to see if Mozo pops up.
8 comments:
It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this, and the overall feel is fresh and informal.
We were momentarily confused by the "rating" in the comparison tables - it's for the provider, but it appears as though it's for the product. We can see some consumers being misled by that.
Otherwise we're looking forward to watching it grow.
Marty
individuum
It would be great if Mozo extends in the SME or micro business market.
There is a gap in the market to help small start-ups, sole traders and the like find the right account for them. I've done it manually and it still hurts to think about the time, energy and effort I had to go through.
Also great to see at least one cat person listed in the Mozo "Who We Are" section. :)
Thanks for the feedback Marty, and sorry that you found the ratings confusing at first, really appreciate the thoughts. It was indeed a decision we needed to make on how best to set it up.
Of course we wanted the ratings to be robust from launch, so decided to have ratings at the provider/product level, e.g. ANZ Credit Cards, rather than at the individual product level. With so many individual products on the market having reviews at the specific level would result in tiny amounts of reviews for each product, which we thought would be less useful for site users.
As well as that, many of the review aspects are more relevant at a provider level than a product level (e.g. customer service, convenience, trust), so we made the call to do it that way for launch.
As with everything we'll gather loads of feedback and will look at making changes down the track if customers would find it more useful at a product level and the reviews hit a scale where individual products can be rated in a useful way.
Rohan
Mozo
Jen - completely agree - and having had to set up the finances for a couple of start ups it's a personal bugbear of mine too! In fact this country makes it far too hard for people to start up a business in many ways, but that's a topic for another day.
So the short answer is yes, we do plan to expand our services to help out the SME market, so lookout for the Mozo SME section in 2009.
Rohan
Mozo
Great subject. I have been playing around with the idea of the comment structure recently.
The popular comment layout is common, so it is easily recognized when scanning to post a comment. If the comment section is in a different format, then I am going to spend more time trying to decipher what everything means.
www.onlineuniversalwork.com
One big challenge of running a business out of your home is balancing work and family. If that is very intresting.
work form home
I’d been taught that left-aligned labels are preferred, to support the prototypical F-shaped eye-tracking heatmap of web browsing. The idea is that it supports easy vertical scanning.
But this study revealed this to be incorrect!
work from home
love to see this discussion! It’s great to see you all working through the issues and also, it’s great to see recommendations for testing. In the end, it’s what your actual users do and prefer that should be your biggest driver in making these decision.
Great article and disucssion!
online marketing
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