MyRates.com.my : Your One Stop Solution for Financial Products Comparison

MyRates.com.my is a website providing up-to-date financial rates for borrowing and investing. It is own by a local Malaysian company which is independent from any financial institution. Save your time going from bank to bank to compare Fixed Deposit rates, or home loan offers. MyRates is aimed to provide a platform for shoppers to compare directly, and conveniently all at one page.

I was contacted by the one site’s owners, James Tee. Since MyRates provides great service for this blog readers all for free, I am more than happy to cover their story here. James Tee is a nice person. You will know more about what is happening behind MyRates in this interview.

KCLau: Can you describe a brief history of MyRates.com.my? What’s the main force that drives you to create MyRates.com.my?

JT: MyRates.com.my has only been around for less than a year. The team is made up of 4 members each with a distinct skill-set but have one thing in common: we want to make MyRates.com.my a key resource for Malaysian consumers shopping around for retail banking products.

The main reason we created this resource was because our personal experience of shopping around for a banking product in Malaysia was horrible (as some of us were initially based overseas). The best place was asking my mum or other family member to recommend a bank but even they don’t know the product pricing. I then looked online to do some shopping around but didn’t find what I was looking for.

KCLau: MyRates.com.my is owned and operated by Bumimaju Kiara Sdn Bhd. From your website, we get to know that you are independent from financial institution. Can you share with us how do you get the most up-to-date financial information?

JT: Currently, we update our information by visiting each banks’ website and we do it at least once a month. Recently, we’ve been getting in touch with institutions themselves to submit pricing changes, promotions and campaigns, etc. In fact, a few have already agreed and are quite enthusiastic about updating their product pricing. This is very exciting for MyRates.com.my because it means one of our key goals of information integrity will be achieved and consumers can be confident on our site.

KCLau: Do you get any affiliate revenue or is it solely by Online advertising revenue? We would like to know your business model if you can kindly share with us.

JT: To be honest, we’ve focused so much on making the site as resourceful as possible for consumers we haven’t given greater thought to the revenue side of things. We strongly believe that the average Malaysian consumer have a hard time finding a useful resource for their banking needs so we’ve used our time solving that problem first. Having said that, we wouldn’t be doing this for nothing either so our initial business case only included online advertising revenue. This doesn’t preclude us from considering alternative sources of revenue moving forward.

KCLau: After browsing MyRates.com.my , I found that there are still many financial institutions not included in the list. How do you plan to dig the info when there is no information available from the relevant financial institutions homepage?

JT: You’re right about other institutions still missing in our list. We started with the main institutions and as many as we can find that provided information in their website. Unfortunately, not all institutions provide that information. Our next phase is getting in touch with every institution and hopefully they will agree to provide that information and updates. If you think about it, it is in their best interest: “fish where the fish are”. One bank that I approached has already agreed to be part of this and others had positive feedback.

KCLau: What is your future plan? Will you include any other financial information such as financial news at MyRates.com.my?

JT: We’ve got a wish list of our future state and financial news is definitely on that list. Our ongoing focus is making sure MyRates.com.my is simple and easy to use for the Malaysian consumer. Other ideas are financial calculators but I recently surfed the net and found a lot of very impressive calculators readily available. So we will just concentrate on adding more product comparisons offered by institutions. Also in the medium term, we’ll be including Islamic Banking products. Watch this space.