Moneysupermarket pays £9m for money websites
Moneysupermarket has made multi-millionaires of a family from the North-West after effectively paying £9m for their personal finance web business.
Offers?: Moneysupermarket's Simon Nixon
The comparison website revealed yesterday that it had paid the Panesar family and other directors of Manchester-based Financial Services Net (FSN) an initial £4.6m, rising to to £9m payable if undiclosed targets are hit within three years.
FSN owns financialservices.co.uk, the springboard for a set of highly valuable web addresses, such as mortgages.co.uk, investments.co.uk, savings.co.uk and creditcards.co.uk. Each site generates leads for financial service providers and will have developed large databases of customer details.
Moneysupermarket, which yesterday revealed a 10% decline in visitors to its personal finance comparison services, said: 'FSN owns and operates a number of website domains which provides a platform for the group to broaden its brand offering to a wider range of customer segments in the money and insurance verticals.
'All consideration payments have been or will be settled in cash out of existing resources.'
The move is likely to help strengthen Moneysupermarket's already dominant position on search engines such as Google.
While user numbers have fallen Moneysupermarket said yesterday in an interim management statement that revenue was up 19% on a year earlier, driven by credit card referrals. 'This was driven by improving product availability from providers and the launch of the new credit card site during the earlier part of the year which helped improve conversion,' according to the statement.
It said the fall in visitor numbers 'in part reflects deliberate actions taken by the group to step away from a number of portal partner relationships which were unprofitable together with the continued low levels of consumer confidence particularly impacting the group's credit related channels'.
Insurance revenues were up 13% and visitor volumes 8% ahead of the same period last year.
Peter Plumb, chief executive, said: 'Overall, we remain pleased with the performance in the year to date which is in line with the board's expectations. Moneysupermarket.com is well placed to capitalise on its strengths as we begin to see signs of growth returning to our markets.'
Earlier this month, Financial Mail revealed Moneysupermarket could itself soon changes hands. Multi-millionaire founder Simon Nixon, who owns 52.5%, said investment bank Credit Suisse was advising after a flurry of interest from potential buyers.
It is understood that many, mostly private equity firms, have been waiting for Nixon to give the green light for bids after he said earlier this year he was not interested in selling out.
The shares fell a fraction today down from 81.80p to 81.75p, following a 4% decline yesterday.
• This is Money offers some comparison services powered by Moneysupermarket. As ever, strict rules at the Daily Mail Group means commercial concerns never interfere with editorial independence... Read more about our rich heritage of editorial independence
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