Online pricing practices get OFT attention

It has just been announced that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) will be investigating online pricing practices.

It’s been a long time coming and will lead to major changes for those seemingly ‘white knights’ of the finance world – the price comparison sites.

In the finance world, there is a little known black art used by these sites which mean a lot of price comparison websites will rank certain financial providers sites at the top of their lists of recommended best buys based on the commission they’ll get from these providers, even when they are not the cheapest.

This gives a false impression to the user that the provider is either cheaper than everybody else or, for some esoteric reason known only to those with the combined secret finance knowledge of the Gnomes Of Zurich and the Bilderberg Group, that it a better product. This means you could potentially actually end up with a worse deal for taking the best buy advice than you could have got by choosing a different product or going direct to another provider.

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