Meet Karen Barrett, CEO and Founder of Unbiased

Tell us about Unbiased? What do you do?

 

Unbiased is a high growth, B2B marketplace SaaS business, empowering people to make confident financial decisions by matching people and businesses seeking financial or mortgage advice to regulated professional and trusted advisers.
It’s a leading finance and property sector-focused business, offering an end to end solution to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to market their business, attract new clients and access tools to improve the conversion of those enquiries into clients.

We’ve developed an algorithm to match people to advisers and create bespoke tools and content to help them understand their finances better, and support them when making big life decisions.

We make it easy for you to navigate through the huge number of financial options available. Experts, advice, tools and guides ensure that you can always access the right information.

Our mission is to help everyone make confident financial decisions, and to support all professional advisers looking to acquire and manage their new business pipeline efficiently.

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 

I’d been working in the finance industry for a decade, and saw how technology was positively impacting financial tasks such as securing the right credit or utility deal. But when it came to the bigger financial decisions, such as planning your retirement or investing or buying your own home, there was nothing.

The number of people needing help making these decisions was growing fast – high numbers of baby boomers were approaching retirement age, pensions and tax regimes were being shaken up, and it was becoming harder to source a mortgage directly from a bank.

As these decisions were infrequent, they were being overlooked, leaving many people to stumble through the most important financial decisions of their lives confused and without help.

At this time in 2009, after my second child was born critically ill, I realised how unprepared I was financially for an increasingly uncertain future.

Busy caring for two small children – one of which needed round the clock care – I did not have time to go through the traditional route of asking colleagues or friends for recommendations (and I was unsure their needs were similar to mine), or choose from generic lists available online where the information provided was untrustworthy.

The industry was stuck in the past thinking people wanted to ‘choose’ an adviser from the largest number possible – when I could see this was highly inefficient and disruptive with many falling out of the process at this point. What they actually wanted was to leapfrog the search and fast track to ‘receiving advice’ which would impact their confidence and financial wellbeing. I saw how data and automation could solve the problem.

So the idea that Unbiased would quickly and easily provide curated matches to trusted regulated advisers was born, using data from thousands of people looking for an adviser to help others in the future. It was also key that Unbiased gave transparency to the costs, process and benefits of advice – effectively educating those who had not made financial decisions before, and making them feel comfortable and confident with various content and tools.

To date, we have helped hundreds of thousands of people access advice using the Unbiased platform, helping to provide optimum outcomes for individuals and their families. I’m happiest when the business is thriving, where I can create a positive social impact and do something meaningful for both consumers and SMEs.

Ultimately, what made me embrace being an entrepreneur fully was that when I faced the worst thing possible with my son’s health and came through it positively, my fear of failure in a professional capacity disappeared.
My own experiences have taught me there is nothing that can give more confidence and security than financial freedom, and I’m privileged to be in a position to help bring this to others’ lives.

 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 

Our platform is constantly growing – and the biggest marker of our recent snowballing growth has been what we’ve been able to deliver to advisers.

In total, we’ve helped advisers acquire over £80 billion in new assets under management (AUM) since we launched, which is an absolutely colossal figure.

Knowing that we have something that could help people all over the world, we’ve also made our first moves outside of the UK. Early last year, we launched in the US market to help connect more investors and advisers.

It was a natural next step for us as there is data showing declining financial literacy and confidence in the US, marking a clear need for Unbiased. We’re making significant progress already.

 

What can we hope to see from Unbiased in the future?

 

At Unbiased, we are determined to play our part in closing the advice gap by ensuring more people than ever have access to expert advice.

In the last year, we’ve seen the industry grow by 8% – and at Unbiased, our growth has outstripped this .
75% of our enquiries have come from people who have never had advice before, demonstrating our ability to create demand in the market.

Our subscription-based platform has been instrumental in supporting this shift by connecting an increasing number of people with the right advice and information. Unbiased is on track to deliver over £20 billion in the next 12 months by using technology to better route enquiries, and by partnering with brands who will work with people at the lower levels of the wealth spectrum who find it difficult to get a match.

Last year, Unbiased raised £5 million to fuel further growth in the UK and launched into the US. We launched a website and by April 2023 had customers trialling the service. Six months later, we were post-revenue and have received high demand from advisers for our product and many positive reviews. The US market is 10 times the size of the UK market, and provides a significant and large opportunity.

Consumers looking to use an adviser to invest in the US also hold three times the size of assets (an average of $1 million) than in the UK. Unbiased’s success in the US is due to the fact that not only does it provide a matching service for consumers to advisers, but does so on a platform which provides data, insights and marketing automation tools so advisers can maximise conversion rates and understand how they can best win new business.
Together with our market-beating policy of exclusive leads (so advisers don’t spend time calling leads that don’t convert), we also have a feature called accept / reject, ensuring consumers get a warm welcome when connected with an adviser.

In the future, the business will look to grow its share of the US market adding thousands more advisers to the platform, and for our UK advisers we will be focussing on data integrations allowing our customers to more seamlessly grow their books of business in an efficient way.