The centre for competition policy has produced a report saying independent checks need to be made of comparison websites.

It’s an interesting report produced by the CCP who are based at the University of East Anglia and I’m sure they have a valid point. Comparison websites are not charities, they are commercial entities whose prime objective is to make money and if they can save consumers money along the way then that’s a bonus.

Trumpo has had dealings with the main comparison sites in the UK, and I have to say they certainly do benefit the consumer in the main, but they are definitely no substitute for personal professional advice.

Simple products such as Gas and Electricity are easy to compare and switching product suppliers is very straightforward and don’t in most instances require advice. Trumpo passionately believes however that consumers need advice for important products such as life assurance and mortgages. These must-have products involve hundreds of thousands of pounds of hard earned personal cash and the last thing you want, when clicking the button to acquire a product, is the computer or it’s programmer to have had a bad day. The major trouble is that there is no recourse with a comparison site, as it’s a computer and disclosures are in the small print and highlight very much that buyers should beware. With a trusted advisor, who is authorised to advise on these very important products, there is a line of responsibility and recourse, so a consumer is protected when taking advice, and dramatically less so if the products are acquired via a comparison website.

So where do the comparison websites go from here? Well I would guess for the simple products their service will go from strength to strength, for the life changing financial products they should be restricted to providing information only and then introduce the client to a trusted adviser if the client wants to purchase a product, the adviser can then ascertain if the product is suitable for the consumer’s specific and always unique circumstances - unfortunately there is not a computer in the land to know all the facts!

I may be blowing my own trumpet, but at Trumpo we have hundreds of trusted advisers on our platform dealing with client enquiries from John O’Groats to Land’s End and these good Ladies and Gents provide good old fashioned honest advice on all the most important subjects, for those less important such as Gas and Electricity we are happy to promote comparison.

Consumers are becoming more internet savvy by the day and demand the best. The challenge we have in the UK is a shortage of good advisers, we have lots of salesman, but not enough professionals. I would say this is one of the reasons comparison sites have exploded, because there is no other alternative. Banks and Building Society staff are all targeted to sell singular products to customers, they are not advisers, they are order takers.

A Trusted Trumpo adviser commits to building long term relationships with their clients before being allowed on our platform and must be able to provide a whole of market and generic client advise service.

Long live the professional adviser…

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