The Hindu Business Line : Moneycontrol.com plans paid service on personal finance

Finanical portal Moneycontrol.com, which soft-launched a service called Ask MC in September, plans to roll out a paid version of the service this month. The free model will stay.

Ask MC is a service where experts will answer queries related to a range of issues including investment, insurance, taxation, credit cards and property. "There's a void in terms of an unbiased, hand-holding environment in the personal finance area, which prompted moneycontrol to launch this service," said Mr Rajneesh Chopra, Head (Marketing), Web 18, a CNBC unit. Financial institutions do provide information but it almost always becomes an exercise in selling their products and services, which is not what the customer might be looking for, he explained.

Mr Chopra said the aim is to provide information that addressed the peculiarities of each query/situation. "This is not generic advice but a highly individualised service," he explained. And because of this, there is not much chance for experts to sell their services/products and would thus ensure that the advice remained unbiased and did not turn into a selling exercise. Moreover, moneycontrol moderates the proceedings to ensure that it stays that way, he added.

Moneycontrol has a panel of 40 experts to address these queries. They include income-tax practitioner Subhash Lakhotia, investment consultants Sandeep Shanbhag and Ganesh Shanbhag, loan advisor Harsh Roongta, taxation expert Ameet Patel and financial planner Amar Pandit. On an average, Ask MC gets about 16,000 queries a month and about 88 per cent of these are from unique visitors - the rest are clarifications/repeat visitors, Mr Chopra said, adding that the portal at large gets five million unique visitors a month.

The Ask MC pages on the portal offer financial advertisers a good opportunity to reach out to their target audiences at a point where they have queries specific to the advertiser's area of operations - for instance, pages featuring queries and answers on mutual funds would have advertisers from that sector, for example, says Mr Chopra. The portal has about 170 advertisers.

Mutual funds is the largest area of interest, followed by taxation, property, insurance and legal issues.

At present, questioners have to register on the portal, send in their queries and wait for about 10 days for an answer. In the paid model, the answers will come quicker, users can choose their expert and have clarifications attended to promptly, whereas in the free version, the clarification will be treated as a new question and there will be more waiting, he explained.

The portal is exploring various pricing models but "prices will not be prohibitive," claims Mr Chopra. There will be differential pricing for individuals, big companies and small companies. But why would corporates want to use this service when they have batteries of experts working for them? Well, they can always do with a second opinion, says Mr Chopra.

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