This entrepreneur is behind finance portal MoneySmart.sg

MoneySmart.sg’s vision is to be everyone’s personal finance coach.

Vinod Nair is the founder and chief executive officer of MoneySmart.sg, a Singapore-based personal finance portal with a mission: to simplify people’s personal finance decisions through its powerful content and product recommendation engine.

“By aggregating and consolidating information and providing original, engaging content, the MoneySmart.sg website aims to be the destination site for people to gain confidence to earn, spend and grow their money and ultimately, afford the life they desire” says Nair, 34 years old.

It first started out as SmartLoans.sg in 2009 with the intent of helping Singaporeans compare various home loan packages online in real time. Today, MoneySmart.sg curates and aggregates 17 different personal finance products, including credit cards, insurance, loans and bank accounts, on one digital marketplace. It also receives an average of 1 million monthly sessions and is visited by an average of 700,000 unique users per month.

Further, it has more than doubled its employee count since Series A funding, adding to its team of developers, content writers, as well as sales and marketing specialists. It also plans to launch into new markets in Asia Pacific.

Nair wanted to help people make smarter financial decisions amidst a glut of information in the market. The technical jargon that cluttered the personal finance space added to the confusion and this made him want to help the public.

Through Smartloans.sg, he noticed there was a disproportionate amount of misinformation that was not adequately addressed for the benefit of consumers. This discovery, he says fueled his intent to arm people with accurate and trustworthy information. “Today, MoneySmart.sg’s vision is to be everyone’s personal finance coach, helping people plan, play and win financially in life,”says Nair.

He also believes that at MoneySmart.sg, employees should be humble and able to work as a team. Having a shared set of company values means there is no room for politics in the company.

Because of these priorities, the company’s hiring process tends to be more extensive than the industry norm. “Rather than bow to the pressure of acquiring talent quickly, the company has intentionally chosen to adopt a careful and deliberate decision-making process, bringing about the quality of people working steadfastly behind the scenes at MoneySmart.sg today.” he says.