Three of Europe's largest publishers of online classifieds including, owners of This Is Essex, have joined forces to create a joint venture.

FinnTech aims to create a European industry standard technology for the provision of online classifieds for regional newspapers.

The companies behind FinnTech: Finn.no, Fish4.co.uk and Associated New Media are backed by some of Europe's largest newspaper publishers, including This Is Essex publisher Newsquest Media Group and Northcliffe Newspapers which are shareholders of Fish4.co.uk

Finn.no is 80% owned by the Norwegian regional newspaper publisher, Schibsted. Associated New Media is owned by Associated Newspapers.

FinnTech's first CEO will be Robert Steen who joins FinnTech from Finn.no where he was international director. "FinnTech is an industry first that sees the online arms of the UK and Scandinavia's regional newspaper groups pooling resources to create a system that can be used across Europe," says Robert Steen.

"The result is an off the shelf solution that local and regional newspaper publishers can use to either power their existing web-sites, or to create completely new online classified solutions."

FinnTech's technology is already being used to power websites in the UK, Belgium, Sweden and Norway, which collectively reach one million visitors a month.

fish4 will adopt the FinnTech website software across its portfolio of classified services: Fish4homes, Fish4jobs and Fish4cars in early 2004.

Fish4 CEO Jonathan Turpin says that consumers, advertisers and newspaper publishers throughout Europe will benefit from the new venture: "By combining our resources with our partners, we can offer newspaper publishers across Europe a cost effective online classified technology that can immediately improve their existing services and give them a competitive advantage against Pan-European and Global scale competitors."

Published Wednesday, May 28, 2003

Brought to you by the Evening Gazette