British Entrepreneur Brings Comparison Sites To Emerging Economies

His path at PwC in deepest London could not be much farther from his next base of operations, in both location and style. Leo diverted from the corporate track in pursuit of something with a greater meaning.

He’s not in entrepreneurship to change the world; he’d settle for changing one person’s life.

It is fitting that his start-up business, Comparabien, is located in the Americas. Leo speaks with a London twang but he was born and raised in Venezuela and his co-founder, Alfredo Ramirez, who he met at business school in the UK, is from Peru.

It is not unlikely to find such an international cohort at Cass, but the odds of the two students today controlling a business that has expanded across six Latin American states were stacked against them. And not just because most start-ups fall at the first hurdle.

The pair combine a passion for their home countries with an entrepreneurial acumen that seems to be second to none. Why the emerging markets of the Americas and not the UK? The question is partly answered by the fact that the founders are Latin American. They wanted to bring a business model back to their home countries. That’s the heart.

Comparabien is a financial comparison website, which those in Britain can liken to Moneysupermarket or the business behind those God awful Go Compare TV adverts. Leo’s start-up compares three verticals; money; insurance, and telecoms.

After launching a pilot in Peru in 2010, the business has swelled to five times its original size; today Comparabien operates in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and México.

With such success, it would be easy to forget the risks involved. Emerging markets may have huge potential for growth, but they are also volatile.

Leo admits it was a safer option to stick with consulting. But that would, perhaps, do an injustice to the influence the Cass EMBA had on his mentality. He does his best to avoid a cliché, but he wanted to follow his dream. “We’ve had this entrepreneurial dream for some time and it’s truly exciting to do something for us; a business that is ours and not someone else’s,” Leo says.

“We were talking about the possibly of taking some proven business models here in the UK to Latin America and we concentrated on online comparison websites. In the UK they didn’t exist 15 years ago, but now they are a proven way to create value.

“The first thing Alfredo did when he went back to Peru after graduating was put together a pilot, and we launched something right at the end of 2010.”

At the time, Alfredo was working with Unilever. Leo was managing the London City Incubator [LCI] (and still does), which is connected to Cass. An executive MBA is supposed to equip you for greater success in your management job. Oh how wrong that path now seems for Leo.

He worked at nights and at weekends to develop Comparabien from London, and raised finance and plotted an expansion course, while Alfredo was the CEO and face of the business in Latin America.

The company hit the heights when they were accepted onto Start-Up Chile, a program of the Chilean Government which attracts world-class early stage entrepreneurs to the country. The accelerator helped 87 start-ups in 2011, and Leo’s business received a six-month spot, as well as some funding.

The market’s potential, however, is what drew them to Chile. Emerging markets are a hot prospect for MBA entrepreneurs, not least because of the booming economies and, in Comparabien’s case, lesser competition. The penetration rate of the internet has also been a factor, says Leo. That was the opportunity.

“Being Latin American, we thought it was about time someone took this concept to our countries. We didn’t really know it would take off, so the acceptance and feedback from people has been brilliant,” he says.

“The region has been growing somewhere between 8-10 per cent in the last 10 years. In Brazil, millions of people have entered into the middle classes. These are people who for the first time are buying a house or a car, are insuring it, and who have access to credit cards. And we realized if this idea will take off somewhere, it should be in Latin America.”

And so far, the Cass pair haven’t been wrong. Institutional investors have also seen the potential and have been prepared to back the start-up. Their expansion success has been heavily dependent on advertising, Leo says.

“This industry is a game that is only won through advertising and our strategy will go hand-in-hand with that,” he says. “We are now raising a second round of funding, and half the budget will go into advertising.”

An ever greater challenge, Leo says, is the regulatory complexity of the individual Latin American countries. Emerging markets may have high growth potential, but they can be difficult, and that is why Comparabien‘s competitors haven’t expanded as rapidly, says Leo.

“Complying with the framework is very different in each company. But while it’s a huge challenge, once it is overcome it becomes a competitive advantage,” he says. “The other challenge is educating people that don’t really believe that our business will create value for them.

“In the UK it’s been happening for years, but in Peru, to convince a bank you will decrease their costs… it takes a little bit of time.”

Leo is still the manager of the LCI and The Hangout, the latter a start-up platform that caters to Cass’s MBA students in London’s Tech City, but will leave those roles soon to concentrate on Comparabien full-time.

When he left EY in pursuit of entrepreneurship, he had no idea that in just a year he would be lighting up the emerging economies of Latin America.

But the final drop that prompted him to switch career paths was an EMBA. “At some point you realize that, regardless of what you do. you’re just a number [at big firms] and anyone else could have done my role,” Leo explains.

Back then, the financial crisis may have ensured that it was risky to stay in a corporate career. And Leo knew many consultants whom were laid off. But entrepreneurship is a risk too, he adds.

“It is easier to have a corporate career, and it’s always less of a risk. But the way I see it is, if we are in control of our own jobs and our own companies, then we are in control of our own futures.” 

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