How we make money

Date: 22 June 2023

RateCity is a financial and credit product comparison and information website that is free for consumers to use.

RateCity may charge fees to third parties in relation to the following:

Referral fees

When you click on product links on RateCity, you may be redirected to a third-party website with which we have a commercial arrangement with. RateCity may receive a fee or commission from a financial institution, financial planner, broker or any other third party for introducing leads to them for their products or services. 

Our service is free for you to use, and any payment we receive will come from the provider. Please note that commercial partners may be featured more prominently. 

Promotional advertising fees

Partners may pay us to advertise their products more prominently. This includes display advertising, promoted products and sponsored sections. Some partners may pay for a “Share of Voice” of the site or a section of the site. For example, a 50% share of voice for the home loans section will mean the institution’s display ads will appear on 50% of the pages served in that product area. 

Content sponsorship

A partner may sponsor a news or article post. In this instance, we will always disclose this with a “sponsored”, “promoted” or “featured” message. We may also display a disclaimer outlining that the article contains sponsored content. 

Award licenses

RateCity Gold Award winners have the option to pay for the use of Award logos in their marketing materials to promote this achievement. However, the methodology and determination of Award winners is made without any commercial influence. We use a data-driven system to compare financial products against a set list of data points. This ensures that there are no conflicts of interest and that we can maintain impartiality. 

For more information about RateCity, including our licence numbers and frequently asked questions, please review our About Page. You should also read an important document called our Financial Services and Credit Guide, which explains our business in even more detail.

How we may display products

We try to offer as comprehensive a list as possible of financial institutions and their financial and credit products. We review it regularly and update the product data daily. We are confident that consumers see a fair and reasonable set of search results, and are able to use the search and filtering capabilities of the RateCity site to find and compare a competitive range of products.

Sometimes, however, there are institutions or products which don’t appear in our default search results, and this can be for one of three reasons:

• Some institutions are not in a position to accept online leads because, for example, they can only deal with customers from a certain industry, or from a limited geographic area, or because they might not be able to process any new customers at all for a period of time.
• Some institutions won’t allow RateCity to get access to their data.
• Some institutions aren’t willing to pay for leads so from time to time or will not provide a suitable consumer link, we’ll exclude them from our default search results if we believe that we can still offer users a good set of search results. However, we always offer consumers the ability to see these institutions with one additional click.

When financial institutions aren’t displayed in our search results, because they have not provided RateCity with a consumer link or have a commercial relationship with RateCity, you can generally find their products in RateCity’s “A-Z directory”, by searching for that institution from a search result page, or by checking the box to “display all” results.