So who is right about the Sainsbury's Finance Unsecured Personal Loan

So if you are looking for an unsecured Personal Loan at the moment you have probably seen the Sainsbury's product available at a typical APR of 7.9%. However, if you looked on another website and in many newspapers it appeared with a rate of 8.7%. So who is correct: in many charts this is the number one loan of this kind, in all the other it is number 3. So who is right?

Here at http://www.thebestbestbuys.com/ we understand how the charts in the newspapers are compiled and due to the editorial process the Sunday Papers show the rates available on the Thursday before. But when we checked a number of websites are still showing the product at a rate of 7.9%. It was only Moneysupermarket that was showing the higher rate of 8.7%.

When we checked http://www.sainsburysbank.co.uk/ it was also displaying the 7.9% APR (as long as you had a Nectar Card). So either Moneysupermarket are accurate or the data in all of the websites that take their data from major providers: http://www.moneyfacts.co.uk/ and http://www.defaqto.com/ have the wrong information.

We contacted the Product Team at Sainsbury's Finance and asked them to tell us who is wrong.....Sainsbury's Finance & 70% of the major consumer finance websites in the UK or Moneysupermarket.com by far the biggest and most influential of all the comparison websites?

Well, well, well. It turns out that it is http://www.moneysupermarket.com/ that are incorrect. Hardly surprising when you consider that they were promoting the 7.9% loan last week as an exclusive product when it was easily available through numerous comparison sites.

At the end of the day this is an error but what it really highlights is that all of the credible consumer finance websites such as http://www.confused.com/, uSwitch, Interactive Investor, etc and all of the national press take their Best Buy information from one of three suppliers, Defaqto, Moneyfacts or Moneysupermarket. If one of these sources is wrong then it is wrong in many other places too.

Unfortunately for Sainsbury's The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, etc. have been publicising the wrong rate and the product that should have been at number one was actually shown at number 3, for the last 2 weeks. Yes they lost revenue but I am pretty confident they will survive.

The moral of this tale is just because Moneysupermarket are the biggest and the most recognised doesn't mean they are the best.