We visited the largest search/portal sites at the end of September to see who was advertising what for users seeking information on business loans.* We were surprised to find the search term sparsely used by financial services companies. The only advertisers were The Lending Tree pitching its online loan auction service at Infoseek and Excite; Intuit promoting CashFinder.com and Quicken on Infoseek; Capital One hawking a 9.9% credit card on Yahoo, and ConsumerInfo.com with a small buy at Infoseek.

Source: Online Banking Report, 9/30/98 *Methodology: We searched on the term “business loan” (parenthesis included) at each of the sites from a Seattle Netcom POP. We hit reload 10 times to measure how often banners were presented. This is only an approximate measure of banner advertising. Time of day, geogrpahic location, and user profile could all impact which banners are presented.

ConsumerInfo.com

www.consumerinfo.com

Privately held ConsumerInfo.com joins QSpace in delivering Experian credit reports on the Web. While QSpace is offering instant access, ConsumerInfo.com requires users to wait for an access code delivered via snail mail. Pricing is also quite different with ConsumerInfo.com pitching a $49.95 per year subscription with unlimited credit report access with subsequent years automatically billed to your credit card until you say stop. QSpace is charging $5-8 per transaction but is working on a similar subscription option. ConsumerInfo.com also sells First American CREDCO’s “3-agency”

ConsumerInfo.com pitches free credit reports and 30 days of free credit monitoring on its own Web.

The Quicken-branded screen at ConsumerInfo.com takes a slightly different approach with two options: subscripton service or a one-time mergerd credit report.

(a.k.a. “merged”) credit reports for $34.95 each www.firstam.com/credco

ConsumerInfo.com also hosts Quicken’s free credit report program on a private-branded basis. Users entering ConsumerInfo.com through its Quicken arrangement see co-branded screens (above) and a slightly lower price (see table). ConsumerInfo.com, a privately held firm located in Orange, CA, was formed two years ago by former TRW executives. On April 27, MemberWorks Inc. (NASDAQ:MBRS) announced a strategic investment in ConsumerInfo.com which includes an option to acquire the company.

Contacts: ConsumerInfo.com, (888) 888-8553; Mary Siegrist is SVP/GM at Credco, (619) 637-3770; Eric Dunn is SVP at Intuit, (415) 944-6000.

Source: company reports