Ex-McKinsey analyst taps AI to help people choose the right credit card, insurance

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee / Flickr.

The credit card market is a murky one for consumers. With wildly varying fees, interest rates, and rewards, it’s hard to know which card is the best for you. The same goes for insurance. One startup’s solution is a comparison site called Masii (English version), which recently launched in Thailand.

Thai people compare up to a dozen different prices before buying car insurance and credit cards, suggests research done by Masii. Compare that to three for the US, and one can see the true need for an unbiased comparison site.

“Despite having some of the most sophisticated online consumers in the world, many of the sites serving Thailand’s financial service market lack the platform architecture and advanced integrations to really show the best prices – or even accurate ones – to the consumer in real-time,” Masii co-founder Maxwell Meyer says.

Call centers are pretty archaic.

So Max and his business partner Matthias Jurgens set out to make a difference in this sector. Max is a Harvard grad who has worked as an analyst and senior associate at McKinsey in China, while Matthias is an expert in mobile technology and cloud computing, having been a pioneer at Deutsche Telekom.

Their startup gives transparent credit card and car insurance quotes from nearly all of Thailand’s major banks and insurers. Users may filter their search depending on what they’re looking for. For example, for credit cards they’ll look at points, cash back, or air miles. For cars, they can check year, brand, and model. The site also compares personal loans, travel insurance, mobile plans, and hotel cards.

Launched in stealth-mode beta in February and then officially this September, it has since had over 40,000 applications for credit cards and car insurance. It’s now number one in this sector in Thailand with over 400,000 page visits in the past month, shows data from Similarweb, beating other players like Gobear, DirectAsia, and MoneyGuru of CompareAsiaGroup, which received US$40 million in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs last year.

Masii co-founder Max Meyer.

Masii represents one of Thailand’s most reputable businesses’ gambit in Southeast Asia’s financial comparison market. 138-year-old multibillion-dollar conglomerate B.Grimm backs the startup, putting an undisclosed amount in its seed round. B.Grimm has been in decades-long relationships with the banks and insurance companies that finance and insure its power assets throughout the region. Starting as a medicine shop in 1878, it has diversified its portfolio to include energy, air conditioning, and real estate. Masii has other investors who are from the tech world, but the founders declined to disclose their identities.

Purely online

The founders claim Masii is a breath of fresh air in Thailand’s financial comparison market – unlike other players, it’s purely online and uses artificial intelligence.

“Others like to say how important call centers are. We think that’s pretty archaic,” notes Matthias.

Those rivals use their websites as a means to get people to ring the call center and apply for a product. Masii does the whole thing online – like how you might book a hotel or a plane ticket. There’s an “Apply now” or “Buy” button accompanying each product on the site that directs the user to a bank’s application page. On places like MoneyGuru, you’d have to open a new tab and find the card yourself.

Beyond Thailand