5 Red-Hot Fintech Startups Pursue Investing and Financial Health
Mobile-first investments and financial health were on top of the agenda during yesterday’s fintech demo day in New York.
Five startups demoed their latest wares during a meetup organized by Empire Startups. Here’s what you missed (in addition to the beer, snacks, and the chance to hang out with fintech’s “cool crowd”.)
Trigger: Stay Alert
The startup Trigger claims it will watch the stock market for you.
“Trigger is an ‘If This Than That’ for finance,” co founder Rachel Mayer said during the demo. Trigger’s mobile first platform allows users to set conditional alerts on stock movements, earnings reports, corporate events, and even Twitter sentiments. An example could be: If Google stock goes up, sell Tesla (I made this one up).
“Once the trigger is fired, you can track possible returns that your trigger could perform overtime,” Mayer said.
The app curates the triggers into a Twitter-like social space, where users can browse and integrate triggers into their own dashboards. The app is still in beta, and will be targeted at advanced traders and retail investors. “We are looking to leverage the customer base of existing brokerages, and build goals on top of existing brokerage accounts,” Mayer said. “Nobody owns the space of triggers, and we are looking to dominate that.”
Debitize: Credit with a Debit Discipline
Millennials don’t like credit cards, and are cautious about debt. That’s why many prefer using debit cards in their daily transactions. But credit cards are a good financial tool for building a credit history. So, Debitize came up with a way to merge the benefits of the two.
“We let you use your credit card with the discipline and convenience of a debit card,” according to co founder Liran Amrany. Here’s how it works: when a user makes a purchase with a credit card, Debitize charges the user’s checking account and stores the funds in a Debitize reserve account. At the end of the month, Debitize automatically pays off the credit card bill. Millennials can, therefore, build credit and get rewards while still using “debit cards.” Debitize collects the interest.
Neurensic: AI for Trade Surveillance
The startup uses pattern recognition to detect high-risk activity, and flag hidden trends in trading. It also mines data to find outlier events, by understanding historical trends, environmental context, and correlation within firm activity.
The app “examines profitability, cost drivers, and industry-specific risk factors to incentivize behaviors and improve firm performance,” according to the company website.
“Today, you can only guess what regulation wants, so we try to solve that with artificial intelligence and high quality data,” Maomao Hu, technical sales lead at Neurensic, said during the demo.
DriveWealth: No Investment is Too Small
This B2B startup aims to tap retail investors around the globe to invest in US securities.
“We want to change the way people think about investment, and educate the next generation of investors that even the smallest investment in an equity can yield real returns,” said Chief Information Officer Harry Temkin.
The app allows users to invest real-time in any stock, no matter the price, with no minimum purchase. “So, say you want to invest in Amazon, that runs at almost $700 a share. You can simply invest $50 and buy a fraction of a share,” Temkin said.
The startup uses a proprietary technology, called the Fracker, to allow for fractional share purchases. Customers can also choose a number of companies, drop those in an Amazon-like shopping card, and then decide how much of each share to buy.
EquityZen: Tap the Private Space
EquityZen aims to put the spotlight on the private company investment space.
“We want to bring private market closer to the public,” said the founder Atish Davda. “Today, there is not a ton of focus on investment opportunities outside of public market, because they have been out of reach.”
The startup works with pre-IPO companies and their employees. The marketplace then gives investors access to those pre-IPO shares “even if they only have a few thousand dollars to invest,” according to Davda.
EquityZen calls itself a stock exchange for private company securities, and targets financial advisers and professional investors.
Check out their video below.
