How We Review Products and Services
Updated September 2, 2024
You may have seen the following disclosure on all of our business, commercial, and financial product and service reviews and recommendations. It reads:
“We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation. Learn more.”
Here we’ll outline the processes that result in unbiased, trustworthy reviews you can rely on. Chweya maintains strict independence between the editorial process by which we evaluate products and the development of financial relationships by the sales staff. The sales staff have no influence over product scores and whether or not we recommend a product. We do make money on some, but not all, of the products we recommend, if you click on a link. Partner relationships may affect where a recommendation appears on our page.
The Team
Our financial products and services team consists of editors, researchers, and compliance experts with extensive backgrounds in the industry. Our members include current and former professionals, as well as dedicated journalists. Collectively, we bring decades of experience covering a wide range of financial topics, such as investments, financial markets, and both business and personal finance. Our previous work has appeared in leading publications like BusinessDaily, Business Insider, CNBC, CreditCards.com, Forbes, Fox Business, Marketwatch, and Citizen.Digital. Drawing on our deep expertise, we provide valuable, unbiased insights to help our readers make well-informed financial decisions.
But we don’t do it alone. We are committed to ensuring that our content and team reflect a diversity of voices. You can read our full Diversity & Inclusion Pledge here, and you can learn more about our editorial team on our About Us page.
Types of Reviews
We publish reviews of business services, financial education resources, and financial products, and those reviews mostly follow one of these formats:
- Roundups of our top recommendations in a product category (e.g. Best Online Brokerage Accounts and Trading Platforms)
- Individual product reviews (e.g. Exness Review)
- Head-to-head product comparisons (XM vs. HFM)
How We Choose the Best Products
Recommendations we make on Chweya generally fall into one of the following categories:
1. Recommendations determined by a proprietary scoring methodology we’ve developed using our deep subject matter expertise and detailed research.
2. Recommendations that rely on our deep subject matter expertise and detailed research.
3. Daily “best rate” recommendations based on our proprietary databases of deposit accounts such as certificates of deposit and savings accounts.
Reviews With Product Scores
We meticulously review financial products and business services to ensure our recommendations are both comprehensive and reliable. We begin by researching the industry to enhance our staff’s expertise in each product. This research often involves surveying consumers who use these products to gain insights into their real-world performance.
Based on our findings, we identify which companies and product features to evaluate. We then collect and analyze the data, develop a robust methodology to assess the criteria, and apply this methodology to determine the overall scores for the companies and their products. Most of our product recommendation articles feature star ratings, reflecting the overall score of each product relative to others in its category.
We developed scoring methodologies for the following products:
- Auto loans
- Auto insurance
- Cancel for any reason (CFAR) travel insurance
- Credit cards
- Credit repair companies
- Cryptocurrency software wallets
- Cryptocurrency exchanges
- Life insurance companies
- Debt relief companies
- Dental insurance companies
- Health insurance companies
- Home warranty companies
- Medicare companies
- Online brokerage accounts and trading platforms
- Online real estate schools
- Personal loans
- Pet insurance
- Real estate crowdfunding platforms
- Robo-advisors
- Small business insurance
Reviews Without Product Scores
We examine an industry to determine the companies we should consider, paired with our deep knowledge of that industry. We gather standardized data using a combination of the information publicly available and user reviews.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the reviews that fall into this category:
- Accounting books
- Budgeting apps
- CPA prep courses
- Financial modeling courses
- Investing books
- Mortgage lenders
- Student loan lenders
- Tax software
‘Best Rate’ Financial Product Recommendations
When the primary value of a financial product comes from the interest rate an account pays, such as CDs and high-yield savings accounts, we structure our reviews a little differently. We collect the rates daily, across hundreds of institutions, to find the best rates. We rank products on the strength of the rate they currently offer and apply editorial filters on top of those to rule out products we don’t deem great for consumers.
Our full methodology provides detail on how we evaluate certificates of deposit (CDs), savings accounts, and money market accounts, and here are some examples of the recommendations we make using this process:
- Best CD Rates
- Best High-Yield Savings Accounts