Consultant-charging match service wants to shake up FS



A newly-launched website wants to turn the financial services industry "on its head" by data matching consultants with firms for a 10 per cent cut of their paycheck.
FindAConsultant was launched last month with the aim of lining up businesses with specialist consultants and charging the business nothing for the service.
Its founder, Sharon Melamed, said the "totally data-driven" site had its eyes on the lucrative financial services sector from its launch date and has already attracted banks, a superannuation company and an insurance company.
"We believe that the sheer convenience of a go-to-site for all types of consulting services fills a much needed gap in the market - particularly in financial services, where there is a constant appetite for consultants in areas such as M&A, risk, analytics, strategy, change and project management," Melamed said.
She said the matching is almost entirely handled by the website's software, with a consultants' profiles held in a database and measured against the firm's needs, which are entered in a tick-a-box format.
"It's very much data driven so there's no room for cushy relationships with this or that consultant," she said.
"The only human element is that every request is quality checked, because there's one question where people can insert a free-form comment about special or rare requirements and a human being has to go over that and overlay that with whatever the matching software has come up with."
"However, the majority of requests are completely taken care of by the software," she said.
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