The bolder, bigger and borderless third season of the Visa Innovation Program is steadily moving ahead. All participants are vigorously working on their innovative solutions and we continue to present them in more detail.
Today, we introduce two promising fintechs from Greece – Wealthyhood, the first DIY wealth-building app for long-term investors, and Finloup, a “buy now, pay later” platform that helps merchants get more consumers at the point-of-sale, leveraging Open Banking.
At a glance:
The Problem
Zooming out to the coming decade, by 2030, Millennials will control over $20T of global assets. Zooming in, more than 50M Millennials in Europe will use an investing app to invest for the long-term within the next 12 months.
They will either pick a trading app that offers no guidance or tools on how to get started, create a long-term portfolio, and build wealth over time, ending up gambling instead of investing. Or they will go with a robo-advisor that will cost them 30% of their wealth until their retirement age, just to get them a model portfolio and rebalance once in a while. And that’s wrong.
The Solution
Wealthyhood is the first DIY wealth-building app for long-term investors. It guides them to build their wealth over time by intelligently investing their money the way they want.
Wealthyhood creates a brand-new investing experience with smart tools to develop, finetune and automatically maintain an investing strategy and wealth-building mindset, personalized insights, and fewer fees.
Why is this important?
Wealth creation is more of a marathon than a sprint and Wealthyhood can help everyone run that race. The team behind the project wants to make smart and personalized investing accessible, so that everyone can grow their money in a way that corresponds to their values and personality. The app guides its users to invest the right way and helps them develop the right wealth-building mindset.
Wealthyhood provides a mix of personalization and automation to help Millennials put their money to work. While its easy-to-use tools enable users to develop an investing strategy that’s right for them, the powerful automation helps them implement and maintain it. They don’t have to be millionaires or experts to have a successful and pleasant investing journey.
Founder Blitz
In order to learn even more intriguing insights, our team met with Wealthyhood’s founders for a quick “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Wealthyhood?
A few years ago, together with Kostas, co-founder of Wealthyhood, we wondered how we could invest our money. So, we spent time trying to identify what was out there to solve this problem and soon realized we weren’t alone in that. There was a typical question among our friends, family, and colleagues: “How can I invest my money? I don’t have the time or the knowledge to trade…”.
Trading apps are usually too complex for beginner investors. They offer no guidance on how to get started or tools to create a long-term portfolio. Everyday investors get caught up in their emotions and end up gambling instead of investing. This was not the experience we were looking for, so we decided to build Wealthyhood to bridge this gap.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Wealthyhood?
As you know when it comes to competing for people’s investments and money, it’s becoming quite a crowded space. No matter how differentiated and confident we are of the superior experience that our product offers, when it comes to attracting new customers, better-capitalized companies have an advantage. This is what we need to overcome, by taking a completely different approach: a user-friendly long-term wealth-building experience for investors that are not financial experts or traders. At the same time, we have a dual-task: Educating Millennials about the need to invest, but also about the reasons they should do so through Wealthyhood.
2. What is your next big milestone?
Our next big milestone is to build the investing experience we envision and make it publicly available through a web platform, iOS, and Android apps. We’ve already launched a beta version of the product and are onboarding the first users from our waiting list. Over the coming months, we want to onboard the whole waiting list and give instant access to new users in the UK and EU!
4. What does success look like for Wealthyhood ?
Success looks like changing the way our generation puts their money to work for them. We want to be the go-to app when beginner investors wonder how they can kick off their investing journey – take them by hand and guide them to wave the storm, not only to invest the right way but also to develop the right wealth-building mindset. We want to grow internationally, in the UK and Europe and be the wealth manager not for the Top-1%, but for the remaining 99%!
At a glance:
The Problem
When it comes to purchasing an item, consumers face a few shortcomings with existing options such as restrained purchasing power, predatory, mispriced, and primarily unfair and unavailable fair credit products. At the same time, merchants face difficulties when acquiring customers. Existing solutions lack consumer-friendliness, promote unaffordability and are plagued with low conversions, order values, and converting customers.
The Solution
Finloup facilitates a purchase directly between consumers and merchants. Consumers get the things they love now and pay later, without having to think twice if they can afford them. The app ensures affordability at the source, by employing proprietary technology that is based on Open Banking and merchant-specific data. Merchants, on the other hand, offer a payment option that solves affordability for their clients, accelerates revenues while it helps avoid discounts and other expensive promotions.
Why is this important?
Finloup leverages Open Banking to check consumer affordability with up-to-date information, taking out the need for credit bureaux scores.
Finloup is like a payment option that helps consumers spend what they can, when they can, without charging excruciating fees, costs, or levies. It’s also beneficial for merchants since it enables a large chunk of the population to buy in instalments, without ever taking a loan or credit card from a bank. It provides a single pipe of normalized, real-time banking data for companies to feed into any of their financial processes and a light dashboard app for any type of device, on top of this data, to be used for: aggregated liquidity, historical trends, alerts, currencies, transactions.
Founder Blitz
Meet Finloup’s founders and learn more about their vision and the next milestones for the company in our “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Finloup?
Finloup in its current form was born out of friction with the market, both on a professional and personal level. Professionally, we’ve all been involved with banks and witnessed a major commercial gap in consumer credit that had to be addressed, especially with the emergence of Open Banking. Personally, each of us had a fair share of bad experiences with loans that went sour and the only way to repay was to go into further, more toxic, and steep debt. Finloup’s mission is to eradicate such toxic cycles of credit and empower a system that does not profit from individual debt mismanagement.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Finloup?
Getting to market has definitely been a demanding task thus far. We’ve had to pivot a few times from how we originally started building Finloup, but we learned so much on the way. For instance, we initially focused on serving large organizations, like banks, in their approach to credit assessment – we quickly realized that this would just burn us out since lenders work at a fraction of the speed that startups do.
2. What is your next big milestone?
We had our soft launch back in April, which was our first major milestone. Now we are focusing on the go-to-market with our sights set to onboard the next 20 customers. We are happily on track and are hopeful that we’ll close the year on a very positive note. In addition, we are fundraising for our seed round, which is also moving along well and are constantly refining our core product and underlying data science to serve our customers and their clients with the best available financial knowledge.
4. What does success look like for Finloup?
Fair credit lies in Finloup’s very core; even our name symbolizes the ultimate goal of breaking the loop of toxic credit, thus the “u” in our name. We measure success in terms of consumer’s well-being. We envisage providing a consumer-centric service, allowing the user to buy whatever they need, wherever they go; then the consumer repays in an easy, effortless way and can use our service repeatedly to make his life better.