Bankrate, Inc. is a consumer financial services company based in North Palm Beach

North Palm Beach, Florida

North Palm Beach is an incorporated village in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The population was 12,064 at the 2000 census. As of 2004, the population recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau is 12,645...

, Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

, in the United States. Bankrate.com, perhaps its best known brand, is a personal finance

Personal finance

Personal finance is the application of the principles of finance to the monetary decisions of an individual or family unit. It addresses the ways in which individuals or families obtain, budget, save, and spend monetary resources over time, taking into account various financial risks and future...

 website.

History

Bankrate was founded in 1976 as a print publisher of the "Bank Rate Monitor." In 1996, the company began moving its business online. Today, Bankrate, Inc.'s online network includes Bankrate.com as well as CreditCards.com, Interest.com, Bankaholic.com, Mortgage-calc.com, CreditCardGuide.com, Nationwide Card Services, InsuranceQuotes.com, CarInsuranceQuotes.com, InsureMe, Bankrate.com.cn, CreditCards.ca, NetQuote.com, and CD.com. The online network received over 150 million unique visitors in 2010. In October 2011, Bankrate announced a definitive agreement to acquire InsWeb for $65 million in cash at closing.

After spending 10 years as a public company traded on the NASDAQ, Bankrate was acquired in 2009 by Apax Partners

Apax Partners

Apax Partners LLP is a global private equity and venture capital firm, headquartered in London. The company also operates out of eight other offices in New York, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Tel-Aviv, Madrid, Stockholm, Milan and Munich. The firm, including its various predecessors, have raised...

 in a transaction valued at approximately $571 million.

In June 2011, Bankrate raised a total of $300 million in gross proceeds with a successful Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Apax retained about 70% of Bankrate's common stock.

Services

Bankrate aggregates rate information from over 4,800 institutions on more than 300 financial products. With coverage of nearly 600 local markets in all 50 U.S. states, Bankrate generates over 172,000 distinct rate tables capturing on average over three million pieces of information daily. Bankrate develops and provides web services to over 75 co-branded websites with online partners, including some of the most trusted and frequently visited personal finance sites on the Internet such as Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

, AOL

AOL

AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

, CNBC

CNBC

CNBC is a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S., owned and operated by NBCUniversal. The network and its international spinoffs cover business headlines and provide live coverage of financial markets. The combined reach of CNBC and its siblings is 390 million viewers...

 and Bloomberg

Bloomberg

Bloomberg may refer to:* Michael Bloomberg , American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician and Mayor of New York City...

. In addition, Bankrate licenses editorial content to over 100 newspapers on a daily basis including The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

, USA Today

USA Today

USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...

, The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, The Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

 and The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...

.

Honors

Bankrate won two awards in 2011 from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW): Holden Lewis' mortgage blog and Bankrate's explanatory series on financial reform were honored. Bankrate writers have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists several times, most recently in 2007 for their coverage of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee's rate cut. In 2008, Forbes named Bankrate #41 in its list of America's 200 best small companies. Forbes previously had honored the website in its Best of the Web five times between 1999 and 2004..