Comparison websites are popular in the Ecommerce and the Travel industries and often act as the primary source of information in the customer’s decision-making process. However, the finance industry is still new to the comparison portals. Kardmatch offers solutions around credit card comparison and offer-aggregation on various credit cards across Mexico.
Comparison portals are a boon to customers to compare prices, offerings across platforms at an efficient pace. Finance comparison portals extracts data pertaining to credit cards from bank websites and helps the customer choose the best card. That’s exactly where PromptCloud helps – on-demand access to web data without the technical hassles.
Kardmatch has been our client since the last quarter of 2017 and has been successfully using our services to power their comparison solutions. We recently had a brief interview with Daniela Jiménez, who handles PR and internal communications at Kardmatch, to understand their offerings better and to introduce them to our readers here on the PromptCloud blog.
Joel Cortés, Managing Director and Founder of Kardmatch Company
Q1: Please give us a quick brief on Kardmatch and its key solutions. How has your journey been so far?
Kardmatch was launched in 2008 as the first credit card comparison website in Mexico. Since then, the company has helped more than 10 Million Mexicans choose the right credit card.
With the launch of Blog Kardmatch in 2012, we expanded our target by reaching more than 1 million visitors a month and more than 150K subscribers. Our Blog is the biggest media specialized in credit cards in the market, and a great place for issuers to interact with consumers.
In July 2018 we launched Promos Kardmatch, the App that helps credit card users have access to the most relevant promotions of their different credit cards, helping them to save on their purchases by making smarter buying decisions. Our goal is to achieve 300,000 users during the first year.
Q 2: What inspired you to come up with the idea of promos Kardmatch and what were the initial challenges?
The idea was born at the beginning of 2017 and emerged as a part of our mission, “Help Mexicans make better decisions when choosing and using their credit cards”
Based on that, we decided to apply a survey in our blog to 2,100 credit card users, to understand the use of awareness of the promotions in their credit card.
The results showed that 56% use their promotions twice a year. Out of this 56%, 40% mentioned that the small usage is due to lack of awareness and 29% forgot to consult them.We identified that Credit Card users know very little about the promotions on their Credit Cards due to:
- Lack of awareness and relevance: The promotions are not actively promoted by the banks and are not customized by the cardholder preferences. Some promotions do not offer a great deal, therefore, they become irrelevant and the user loses interest in the rest of the promotions.
- Lack of Accessibility: They must have to visit the different banks’ websites of their Credit Cards to find them.
- Bad Timing: Cardholders might lose the chance to buy what they need with a better deal, as they were not aware of the promotion.
The initial challenges were data extraction, without need to have several people doing this work manually, and to identify the source of information, as the information is present on the different promotion websites of the banks
Q 3: In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that only 29 percent of Mexican adults accessed credit. Do you think the scenario is changing now?
Yes, it is changing, but there is still a lot to be done in terms of financial inclusion. With the recent approval of the Fintech Law, what is sought is to promote the development of various products and financial solutions through technology and innovation and make it available to more people, some services such as:
- Electronic Payments
- Financing
- Financial Consulting
- Virtual Assets
Q 4: According to you, how are Big Data and AI technologies transforming the finance domain?
Artificial intelligence and big data are helping to create more personalized solutions for customer service, a clear example is chatbots, which through the collection of data, the interaction between a person and a robot becomes seamless and natural.
Another thing that is changing through big data, is the way that banks are giving a better offer of financial products, in which they can improve the interests of a loan or in a credit card, depending on the behaviour that each client has with his account.
Q 5: What was the biggest challenge that you faced when it comes to web data extraction?
One of the main challenges we face is that bank sites change all the time. “When you finally adapt to collect the information in a way, they change the layout. This complicates and delays the extraction of data.”
Q 6: What are your plans and strategies for boosting the business growth this year?
The first step we have planned is to grow the number of downloads and users of the app. We will achieve that by optimizing SEO for Promos Kardmatch to generate more traffic using banners on our sites. When we have a robust database, we will monetize the app by offering advertising spaces to our current business partners.
We plan to analyze our users’ database to identify opportunities for cross-selling a different credit card with the aim to grow our acquisition strategy.
Q 7: What prompted you to choose PromptCloud as your data partner and what challenges in web scraping did we help you overcome?
Our objective was to extract weekly content from 8 promotion sites that contained around 1,000 offers, which was impossible to do manually. We looked for a supplier in Mexico, but we couldn’t identify someone who could offer a fully managed web data scraping service. So, with some research on the internet, we found PromptCloud, and based on the good reviews from other customers, we decided to start working with you.
