Singapore, Tuesday 6 October 2015 – MoneySmart.sg, Singapore’s #1 personal finance portal by unique visitors and page views, today announced its Series A Funding of S$2.8 million led by SPH Media Fund and joined by a contingent of capital firms such as Convergence Ventures, OPT SEA and Golden Gate Ventures, and corporate chiefs and entrepreneur luminaries including Alfred Chia – Chief Executive Officer of SingCapital, Mohammad Ismail – Chief Executive Officer of Propnex, Alan Lim – Director of Propnex, Dan Lynn – Vice President, Asia-Pacific for Homeaway, and the co-founders of Zopim – Royston Tay and Kwok Yang Bin.
Vinod Nair, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of MoneySmart.sg reflects on the new cash inflow: “MoneySmart.sg is Singapore’s voice of authority on personal finance. Since 2009, we’ve helped thousands of Singaporeans compare and get the best financial products. We curate and aggregate 16 different types of personal finance products on one single digital marketplace platform for ease of making better decisions.”
Chua Boon Ping, Chief Executive Officer of SPH Media Fund – Singapore Press Holdings’ new media investment fund to help high performing start-ups grow and expand – said: “We at SPH Media Fund have studied MoneySmart.sg closely and we are impressed by the achievements of Vinod and his team. We are confident that MoneySmart.sg will be able to accelerate its growth both in Singapore and regionally.”
“With the rise of the middle class across Southeast Asia, an increasing number of people are becoming more interested and sophisticated in financial investment knowledge. There is a strong demand for a comprehensive site where people can look for and compare financial products that meet their individual needs” he added.
MoneySmart.sg first started out as SmartLoans.sg in October 2009 with the intent of helping Singaporeans compare various home loan packages online in real time. Over the following years, multiple niche sites for comparing credit cards and insurance packages were launched independently. In August 2012, MoneySmart.sg launched as a blog and in May 2014, all sites were consolidated into one portal. Today, MoneySmart.sg offers a wide range of personal finance services – credit cards, insurance and, personal and home loans being the primary raft of products in demand.
MoneySmart.sg enjoys a staggering 1.5 million page views a month and 500,000 in unique visitors. Content syndication partners include top-line digital news sites – AsiaOne.com, MSN.com and Yahoo!. MoneySmart.sg’s unique brand proposition is its easy-to-use self-serve consumers tools and incisive fiscal-driven content to help consumers make smarter financial decisions in real time.
In November 2014, MoneySmart.sg bought over Indonesian counterpart now known as DuitPintar.com. The buyout was a full equity acquisition with the latter taking up a minority shareholding stake in MoneySmart.sg. DuitPintar’s traffic data sees over half a million page views a month.
Adrian Li, Founder and Managing Partner Indonesia capital venture firm Convergence VC offers his take on his company’s investment stake: “MoneySmart.sg is a proven startup success story in Singapore and the region. Headlined by an extremely passionate and experienced team, MoneySmart.sg’s entrenched leadership position in Singapore’s consumer finance sector ensures a strong competitive advantage to win in Indonesia’s highly attractive fintech market. We see a large and fast growing need for the country’s rising middle class to access a variety of financial products that are not effectively distributed offline including lending, mortgage and insurance verticals. Hence we’re excited to support Vinod and his team on their regional expansion through this round of financing.”
In closing, Vinod shares his plans for MoneySmart.sg: “My immediate plans moving forward is to disburse funds into product development and this includes new products, tools and mobile phone apps. Money will go into marketing to amplify the brand and, expanding into new territories in Asia is the next big thing for MoneySmart.sg.”
Disclosure: Money Smart is a portfolio company of Convergence Ventures
Attributed to: Katrina Karim