Vast opportunities for financial metasearch platform

Marnix Zwart, co-founder and CPO of GoBear

With 60% of the Vietnamese populace under the age of 35, the customer group demands more convenient, consistent, and accessible financial services, especially in personal loans, credit cards, and wealth management. As a consequence, the marketplace is becoming crowded with local and international financial institutions.

There are also financial technology (fintech) companies eagerly seeking to disrupt or help to strengthen traditional financial institutions’ route to market. GoBear is among the latter. The Singapore-based fintech company is Asia’s first and only metasearch engine for insurance and banking products, which provides users a comparison platform that is unbiased, free, and easy to use.

GoBear helps business partners to present their products to potential customers in the most engaging way possible, and in turn enhances their conversion rate and lead value. On the occasion of GoBear’s first anniversary of Vietnamese operations, Marnix Zwart, co-founder and chief product officer, discusses with VIR the company’s promising business outlook in the country.

GoBear was the first metasearch engine for financial products available in Vietnam and has been in operation in the country for a full year. What were the key milestones during this year?

Vietnam is our 6^th market to offer personalised financial products comparison, and we are happy with our pace of growth here. Despite being the group’s youngest market, GoBear Vietnam has demonstrated consistent development in a number of business criteria throughout the past year.

Notably, since our official launch in Vietnam in early December 2016, we have achieved nearly one million users on the website www.gobear.com/vn. The increasing traffic we see on GoBear Vietnam proves the genuine confidence users have in our comparison services.

During our first year in Vietnam, we have also successfully launched three different products, with the comparison of credit cards, personal loans, and travel insurance. 

Additionally, GoBear now has a handful of educational campaigns in collaboration with our new business partners. Our key priority is now to broaden the variety of the products on the GoBear Vietnam platform as we continuously look to enhance the seamless user experience, with advanced search and filter options to help users find the best products.

What plans does GoBear Vietnam have for 2018? Are there any particular pressure points that you want to focus on?

GoBear is a global brand in the making and we are very focused on being local to serve customers in each of our key markets in the best way. In Vietnam, it is important for us to offer the best comparison services put together by a team of Vietnamese specialists. It is our belief to focus any expansion plan around the community in which we operate.

In 2018, GoBear Vietnam will focus to add life and health insurances on the insurance comparison site, alongside travel insurance. Unlike other forms of general insurance, the search for the right health insurance plan requires more consideration, especially when the needs of more than one person in the family have to be taken into account. 

To lessen that burden, GoBear will be the first metasearch engine in Vietnam to offer a free comparison of health insurance policies, and users will be able to find a range of insurance plans that match their specific needs in just a few clicks.

We are also looking forward to adding home loans and car insurance to our comparison platform in Vietnam as well.

What can you share about the prospective new business partnerships being formed to fuel the company’s growth target?

We have already been collaborating with many well-known financial institutions in Vietnam and I am very happy to see that GoBear is becoming a popular brand in the local technology and financial services sector.

The increasing attention and inquiry from the insurance and banking industry for GoBear proves that our presence is bringing positivism to the market.

However, we are very critical in our partner selection process. Although the more the merrier, we only look for partners who share our vision and mission of bringing the best financial products to Vietnamese consumers.

We have a list of potential partners to work with in 2018 ready in the pipeline, and I hope that GoBear will eventually become the fintech partner-of-choice for financial institutions in Vietnam.