Google is on a shopping tour again. The global search giant has acquired BeatThatQuote.com, a comparison site for financial products, for £37.7 million (Update – December 2022: The startup seems to be no longer in business and we therefore deactivated the link).
BeatThatQuote was founded in 2005 and is based in London. John Paleomylites, the Managing Director of the young company today stated via their homepage: “We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products.”
Paleomylites continued: “We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products.”
For Google this is yet another step into the e-commerce space, and is a great deal for both parties. It does raise, however, the question of whether Google is indeed acquiring more and more e-commerce companies competing with players that are trying to monetize their SEO and Adwords traffic – just a coincidence? Only time will tell!
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