GoBear launches in Malaysia — financial comparisons made easy

Insurance is often boring…and mighty confusing. If you’ve ever been lost or utterly befuddled by travel or credit card insurance plans, then GoBear is here to help you.

GoBear calls their service an insurance Meta Search engine. What this means is that it’s like Google or TripAdvisor but for insurance/finance policies and plans.

One of the things GoBear prides themselves on is their unbiased comparisons. The company accomplishes this by not taking any incentive or payments from insurance companies. In other words, they do not do paid content (banner ads, etc) on their website so that frees them from any bias stemming from financial sources.

Besides that, GoBear also claims to make the process of comparing insurance plans simple and easy to understand by stripping the plans down to their “bear” essentials. Take travel insurance plans, for example. GoBear has identified five major categories — Personal Accident, Medical Expenses, Loss of Baggage, Trip Cancellation and Emergency Medical Evacuation — that they think consumers will value most.

To search for a plan, simply enter your destination, type of trip, the number of people travelling, duration of travel and hit “search plans”. The results can then be filtered appropriately according to your needs.

Users can also pick up to 4 plans to do a detailed comparison between them. Once they’ve decided on a plan, simply hit “Go to provider” and GoBear will transfer the user to the provider’s site.

It’s a pretty slick interface and the fact that there are no ads or pop-up banners makes the overall experience that much smoother.

For now, GoBear Malaysia can only compare travel insurance and credit card finance plans, but the company plans to add personal loan, car insurance and life insurance by the end of the year. Currently, GoBear has records for over 40 travel insurance plans, 196 credit cards and 37 Islamic cards.

For more information, you can head on over to their website to check it out for yourself. For now, there is no mobile app for GoBear yet but there are plans for it to come in the future. However, it is worth noting that the GoBear site is very well optimised for the mobile browser.