MoneySuperMarket’s strutting businessman isn’t dancing any longer, at least in the view of the stock exchange.
The price comparison site's shares took a fearful kicking on the markets, despite the company reporting a 14 per cent rise in pre tax profit to £91m last year, because of what it said about what is happening now.
Low interest rates have led to lots of fairly miserable offers in the savings sector, making consumers reluctant to switch. Energy has also been running short of puff for the business.
As a result revenues are running below where they were last year. Happy days if you’re in financial services and your bonus is linked to offering poor value to consumers who stick with you through inertia rather than spending a little time looking into whether there mightn’t be better out there.
It remains a fact that far too few of us make use of switching services and that makes the financial services industry less competitive than it ought to be.
So, this is one of those rare occasions when I’d argue that a company that has just turned in a 14 per cent increase in profits ought to be making still more.
It would be making more if more of us were willing to shop for financial services in the same way as we shop for groceries or other consumer goods.
The fact that we don't allows insurers to spin mendacious stories about car insurance premiums going up by £75 to cover the cost of properly providing for accident victims. If they operated in a truly competitive market they wouldn’t be anything like as confident as they appear to be of their ability to push through prices rises like that.
But it isn’t just insurance. The current reluctance to switch current accounts, or savings accounts, allows a retail bank like Lloyds to dangle the prospect of enormous profits before its investors, now the business has been fixed.
A notable feature of its recent results was that it was able to push through an increase in margins, in part by paying less to savers. Lloyds was only able to do that because its customers allowed it to.
If they started walking out of the door in numbers, those rates would be back up in a heartbeat.
There comes a point when we as consumers have to step up to the plate, and either accept paying over the odds for financial products, or do something about it.
MoneySuperMarket, which takes a cut from financial firms that use it when its clients buy their products through its website, and its competitors aren’t perfect, by any means.
To get the best deal possible, you really need to search two or three of them, and you should also call up the firms that shun its services, as some big insurers such as Aviva and Direct Line do.
But even if you only use one of them, you’ll probably save. Perhaps we just need to be bombarded by more annoying ads featuring that strutting businessman or the company’s overweight builder. Or the irritating opera singer GoCompare uses. Or those insufferable meerkats. Sergei and whatever they call his annoying pal could really do with a close encounter with a bird of prey.
But if seeing more of them all is what it takes, so be it because if the end result is that financial services becomes more competitive, it won’t just be MoneySuperMarket and its competitors that benefit. We all will.
