Ömer Paksoy and I started Hesapkurdu in 2010 and ran it until BHL bought the company in 2023. Thirteen years, and still the thing I have spent most of my working life on.
Banking in Türkiye treated people very differently depending on who they were. If you had a private account manager, you got a rate someone negotiated for you. If you didn’t, you got whatever the branch offered and no way of knowing whether it was good.
Hesapkurdu let the second kind of customer do what the first kind already had done for them: research beforehand, compare the actual rates, and understand the trade-offs before committing to anything. In that sense it was a social project as much as a business. The guides and calculators were free and widely used, and I think they did more for financial literacy in Türkiye than anything else we built.
The first few years were mortgage brokerage, and it was not fully digital. We had a team of mortgage advisors who walked people through the whole process by hand. Customers appreciated it more than almost anything else we ever did.
We eventually had to let the offline support arm go and became a fully digital platform. That was the right decision commercially and it still cost us something real.
A marketplace needs both sides, and in the beginning neither existed. Consumers didn’t know they could compare. Banks didn’t know how to be present on a third-party digital platform, and mostly didn’t want to be.
So much of the work was education rather than technology — teaching one side that comparison was possible and the other side how to show up for it. Building both sides of a market for digital acquisition, at the same time, is the part people underestimate.
Türkiye’s leading financial comparison marketplace: millions of people a month, a team of over a hundred, and the country’s top organic search visibility in banking, credit cards and loans.
We also brought a significant amount of foreign capital into Türkiye. Marco Pescarmona and Alessandro Fracassi came in personally at the very beginning, then MAP locally, then NN Group from the Netherlands, then BHL Group from South Africa and the UK — the team behind Comparethemarket.
We became Endeavor entrepreneurs. Along the way the company was named one of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 in Türkiye in 2017, ranked among Türkiye’s fastest-growing companies, and won the BNP Paribas International Hackathon.
This is the part I am proudest of. We worked hard at keeping people happy and our satisfaction scores were consistently high. A hundred people, thirteen years, and most of them stayed a long time.
BHL, by then our majority shareholder, bought most of the remaining shares in 2023 at a $65M valuation and I moved on. Hesapkurdu is today part of Mavriq, the comparison arm of Moltiply Group, which Marco chairs. It ended up back with the people who started out with us.
The company site is at hesapkurdu.com. The insurance side of the story is on the Koalay page.
If you’re building a marketplace and want to talk about the two-sided problem, write to me.