Rate shopping made even easier? Comparison site RateSupermarket.ca is now offering a mobile app billed as “the answer to your mortgage mobile prayers” and focused on comparing up-to-the-minute bank, broker and credit unions rates.
Rate shopping made even easier?
Comparison site RateSupermarket.ca is now offering a mobile app billed as “the answer to your mortgage mobile prayers” and focused on comparing up-to-the-minute bank, broker and credit unions rates.
“What we’ve seen from our customer base is a demand for mobile and that just feeds into their overall desire for transparency,” Penelope Graham of RateSupermarket.ca told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “Our customers are looking for their own information and the mobile app will make the information all the more accessible; it will make their options that much more accessible, even in an open house.”
Officially launched in June 2013, the app currently only offers mortgage rates, but the company plans to widen its offering to include everything offered on RateSupermarket.ca.
“It will expand to include all of our other offerings; comparison for bank accounts, credit cards, GICs and life, home and travel insurance,” Graham said.
So how will automatized rating tools – that allow clients to simply plug a few numbers into their smartphone instead of relying on their brokers to find the best deal -- affect the industry?
“Brokers use us as part of their marketing mix; we’re part of their income, they advertise on our site and the app isn’t going to change that,” Graham said. “Brokers will be that much more accessible to consumers through the app.”
In a technological landscape that features an app for everything, it was inevitable that a consumer-aimed mortgage calculator would be developed for the Canadian market, argue some analysts. But brokers will likely have to wait to see if increasingly fickle rate shoppers embrace this latest tool.
