THE launch of an insurance comparison site that pits Australia's biggest health insurers against one another with their blessing and their funding could herald the start of a new sector that is worth more pound stg. 1 billion ($2 billion) in Britain.

Upstart comparison engine Moneytime is moving out of beta mode after more than a year of testing, creating a market for health insurance where consumers can benchmark rival products against one another and complete the transaction with the click of a button, competing head-on with Ninemsn's iSelect site.

David Miller, one of the founders of Moneytime, said the launch of the sector in Britain had transformed the way consumers bought insurance and the way insurers marketed themselves.

He said it also removed sales people and call centres and brokers from the equation.

"The comparison site has not taken off in Australia and it is still very much in its infancy," Mr Miller said. "I have been spending a long time trying to figure out why we are so far behind the rest of the world.

"The metrics from overseas on this are just incredible and people don't go anywhere without going to a comparison site first.

"In the UK, 73 per cent of some insurers' business now comes from a comparison site."

Mr Miller said the Australian industry had grown from the perspective of information aggregators, compiling information put online by insurers.

"That is good and interesting and nice, but it is not very useful and it's not encouraging people to do stuff," he said. "The other half of it is the service providers, the banks and insurance companies themselves don't particularly like intermediaries anyway."

The Moneytime model is supplied with information about policies and prices direct from insurers, taking a commission for each sale, which is not added to the cost of the policy. It boasts eight of the top 10 health insurers, including NIB, HBA, MBF, Australian Unity and HCF.

"The existing sites only compare one dimension, which is price, and the real comparison sites are comparing the internals of the product," Mr Miller said.

He said the only sector that had seen a degree of real comparison in Australia was credit cards, but he believed Moneytime would be able to expand from its base in health insurance to broader insurance, banking products, home loans and other areas where it was not necessary to have a face-to-face or phone-linked interaction with a consumer.

"My mission is to have the comparison information (with) a complete lack of bias," he said.

The insurance comparison website sector was started in Britain by car insurer Admiral, which launched a sub-brand comparative website called Confused.

Alone in the marketplace in 2006, in three years TV and press advertising spending in the sector has gone from just pound stg. 5.5 million (almost all of that by Confused) to more than pound stg. 76 million last year.

"The dominance of price comparison sites as a method of buying car insurance in the UK is reflected by the fact that in 2008, 73 per cent of Admiral's new business originated through price comparison sites, up from 50 per cent in 2007," Admiral says in its most recent annual report.

Britain has also seen the rise of financial services comparison site Moneysupermarket, which dominates the sector.

Mr Miller called the wholly independent operation in Australia a "proof of concept" and said as the model took hold it could be expanded into a wide variety of areas. "Our objective is to develop the full comparison engine."

Ninemsn already operates a comparison site, iSelect.com.au, but Mr Miller said he believed there was room in the market for three or four strong competitors as consumers grew used to them.