Credit Card, Mobile, Phone Plan Comparison

Credit Card, Mobile, Phone Plan Comparison

I'm on a bit of a comparison rant at the moment. :)\n\nRecently I was looking at credit cards. In poking around the various bank sites and infochoice.com.au it became obvious that deciding on the best credit card plan for oneself is not exactly an easy task. It shouldn't be a difficult task but its complicated by two things:\n 1. lack of any good way to compare credit card plans in terms of features, rates etc\n 2. lack of any good way to play \"What If\" with your own credit card usage\n\nIssue 1. is partially solved by RateCity which utilises data collated by CANNEX. The interface could do with some improvement but its basically functional.\n\nIssue 2. I've not seen anyone tackle but I propose that it could be solved quite nicely in conjunction with the data provided by CANNEX. How about a service where the user provides their latest 6 months worth of credit card statements for analysis by some magical computer program which will take into account stuff like your monthly spend, monthly repayments, monthly remaining (debit) balance and then lookup the CANNEX database to suggest the plan on which you'd be paying the lowest fees/interest.\n\nSimilar issues are found when selecting a mobile phone plan for example (should I choose a capped plan or pre-paid, or post-paid, or ...), and even regular fixed line plan so the same idea could apply - upload your monthly statements and let magical computer find you the cheapest plan. Number crunching is what computers are good at afterall...\n\nThe business model behind such a service seems pretty straightforward. Given the amount of money the typical credit consumer could save you could probably charge a fee for the service but I propose that you'd be much better off giving the service away for free. Instead charge the banks a referral fee since they already have massive advertising budgets.\n\nThe best part about this idea is that it doesn't have significant startup costs and its not technically difficult - one for any budding computer science student to have a bash at (and if anyone would like some advice implementing this feel free to email me).\n\nSome implementation notes: for the privacy conscious you could simply provide a web form for the user to type in their numbers, but for those who are willing you could totally scrape that data straight out of the user's online bank account(s) as most banks provide ability to download statements into Excel spreadsheets, CSV etc.