Interview: We've knocked billions off Britain's bills, says MoneySupermarket boss Peter Duffy

Peter Duffy says that he has saved consumers in Britain nearly £3billion in a year on household bills, which is not a sum to be sniffed at in a cost-of-living crisis. Or, to be precise, his company has.Duffy, 60, is chief executive of Mony Group, whose best-known brand is MoneySuperMarket. It also owns MoneySavingExpert, founded by TV consumer guru Martin Lewis, and the cashback site Quidco.‘We had nearly 13million active customers last year, and we saved them, I think, nearly £2.8billion,’ says Duffy.‘Real people can’t afford to waste money on policies that don’t meet their needs in the most effective way, at any time.‘You shouldn’t be overpaying if you don’t need to when money is tight.’ In charge: Peter Duffy is the chief executive of Mony Group, which owns MoneySupermarketDoes he pull in more customers when people are nervous about the economy as they are now? Duffy replies: ‘Well, I don’t think anybody thinks at any time, “I’m feeling particularly flush this month, I’m going to spend more money on my insurance.”’Energy bills are a focus at the moment, with a 30 per cent increase in the number of people looking to switch provider after the price cap rose by 13 per cent in July. That took the annual cost for a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit to £1,663.What is it like, I wonder, working with Martin Lewis? On the one hand, Lewis is the most famous money-saving man in the UK. On the other, he was recently accused of ‘mansplaining’ to Kemi Badenoch when he gatecrashed a TV interview with the Conservative leader on student debt.Lewis later apologised, but is there a danger for Mony if he is too outspoken and combative?‘Martin is a campaigner. He very much puts the consumer front and centre of everything he does, and he’s out there on their behalf,’ says Duffy. ‘He’s completely passionate about making sure people aren’t ripped off, making sure they’re getting better deals, and making sure people understand what can be quite complicated.‘He does a brilliant job, which is why he is one of the most trusted. Martin is about trying to empower the everyday person in the UK. He’s a very strong force for good.’Mony’s roots go back 40 years, when it was founded as Mortgage 2000. It morphed into Moneysupermarket.com in the late 1990s, and was floated on the stock market in 2007, valued at £1billion.The company bought MoneySavingExpert.com for £87million in 2012 and changed its name to Mony Group two years ago, though it still uses the moneysavingexpert.com web address.Duffy, who began in banking, took the top job at Mony in 2020. One of the attractions, he says, was to run an organisation trying to help ordinary families in a ‘smart, modern way’. He says: ‘I’m from Liverpool, I went to a comprehensive, my parents were primary school teachers. I don’t want to wear it on my sleeve particularly, but that shapes you.’Mony reported record revenues of £227million in the first six months of this year. Analysts praise Duffy’s focus on creating more predictable and more profitable growth, and his plans to expand into areas including small business banking and investments.But isn’t there a danger he has taken MoneySuperMarket into investments at just the wrong moment if the tech share bubble bursts as many experts predict?‘I hope not. What we’re doing is making it super easy for you to invest if you want to,’ he says.Duffy’s hard work and hopes are so far not reflected in Mony’s share price, though, which is down a third since he took over.One reason its shares have struggled is the fear that artificial intelligence will erode Mony’s business model, even though Duffy is embracing the technology.Another is concern about pay-per-click (PPC) inflation – when the cost of buying advertising space on search engines such as Google goes up. The likes of MoneySuperMarket have to pay more to win the same business.Mony’s gross profit margin fell by 3 percentage points due to PPC inflation, which, though it has fallen from an eye-watering 20 per cent last year, is still running at about 8 per cent. Duffy’s strategy is to try to create a less transactional and more meaningful relationship with customers. He wants them to become committed regular users instead of using the site once a year to get, say, a good travel insurance deal.The SuperSaveClub, which was launched three years ago and now has 2.5million members, is a key part of that reinvention. The club is a loyalty and rewards programme, handing out perks to customers when they buy a product.In simple terms, it’s designed to be a tender trap. The hope is customers will be so seduced by the convenience of the various benefits that they are not tempted to stray to a rival operator.A new ad campaign starring former Doctor Who actor David Tennant, who has replaced Dame Judi Dench as the face of the brand, aims to signal the shift.As for the fears that AI will make the business model obsolete, Duffy points to MoneySuperMarket’s new AI-enabled ChatGPT app.‘We are trying to save you time and hassle with the app. We only ask you for information we haven’t asked before,’ he says.‘If you’re applying for car insurance, there can be 40 questions; and say you’ve got an additional driver or a condition, it could be over a hundred questions. We’re trying to take that friction out.’He is unsurprisingly sceptical about the idea people will use AI themselves to find good deals, making MoneySuperMarket redundant. He says: ‘We’ve got a deep moat here. Everything we do is regulated. Everything we do involves the exchange of quite significant amounts of personal data, and if you put that into an AI large language model, you wouldn’t know where that went.‘If you’re doing a home insurance policy and you’re listing your most valuable items, worth over £500, you’ve got to be really careful about how that data is used.’He adds: ‘We use AI to help customers. A really good example is our Price Optimiser on car insurance. If you’re taking out car insurance with us, we go back and check your answers to come up with suggestions for how you could bring down your premiums.‘Two hundred thousand people have saved an average of £25 doing that over the last six months. There’s a whole checklist of things that, if you began to work through it, I think you’d be surprised at how it all adds up to a total saving.’Staff are encouraged to do this themselves. Duffy says: ‘We take a whole day for them to work on their finances, called the Big Money Workshop.’Duffy was paid £1.8million last year so his need is less acute than most, but he does attend the event and says: ‘I always enjoy it. You always end up saving money. We’re helping people save more money than they used to.‘But there are still too many people who pay the cost of inertia, and that can be very expensive.’In a better world, perhaps there would be no need for Mony, as companies would not fleece their customers and politicians would be good economic stewards. Arguably it is wrong to see the cost-of-living crisis as a problem for individuals to solve by being smarter consumers. It is also a structural crisis, inflicted by venal and misguided politicians, weak watchdogs and corporate greed.These are deep waters. Until that utopia arrives, Duffy says: ‘There are broader political themes. 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