Bringing accurate robo-advice to retail investors on worldwide securities is a breeze for 80s music fan Nicholas Roe and his team at SelfieWealth.
What is SelfieWealth – what problem are you solving?
I wouldn’t say we are problem solving, as we are a unique offering. What we offer is pure robo-advisory on worldwide securities across 47 markets based on Time Series and price momentum data. We process two years of data each day for each security, the algorithms or robot, used are based around a neural network, multi-layer perception with proprietary factors that we continue to refine to produce an advice note for all securities and with the additional functionality of being able to construct portfolios. Because of the nature of the inputs, the robot is at its most accurate between seven to 60 days in forecasting where prices will move to and because most executions, particularly in equities are machine driven now, it is remarkably accurate.
The origins of SelfieWealth came out of a B2B AI Project trial from 2013 – can you take us through that?
Not a B2B trial, more out of an academic exercise to produce a series of algorithms to forecast where market prices might go, with constant refinement and recalibration, the decision was taken in 2016 to commercialise the system.
Honestly – what is so different, compared with other robo-advisers?
Most robo-advisors are AI search engines, which calculate the subscribers risk profile in order to promote other firm’s financial products to invest in. We don’t, we can work in the B2B space to help investment companies to manufacture and design robo funds and products, we offer pure market investment advice on traded securities only for retail professionals, we are the only pure robo advisory for globally traded listed securities in the UK.
Who came up with the name?
We looked at a series of different names, none of us liked SelfieWealth at first, but looking around we saw that our competitors were having difficulties in branding and differentiation with their company names, we realised very quickly that SelfieWealth as a brand name stuck in people’s minds and they remembered it.
What advice would you give new startups in this space?
Make sure you identify your target market segment properly and build a pitch around it. If there are a lot of competitors in the space you are looking to occupy, how will you differentiate yourself? Just having a product that does something slightly better or cheaper in a crowded space isn’t going to work unless you have a unique brand and a big marketing budget. Make sure you make sound financial plans; you may find yourself running into financial difficulty quickly if you don’t know what everything costs.
We have an array of craft beers and independent music at FinTECHTalents – Give us a great song to listen to while we sip your favourite tipple <== Please tell us the drink as well!
Breezin’ by George Benson being an 80’s fan, and a Long Island Iced Tea or Mojito!
Meet SelfieWealth – one of our 2019 FinTech Stories companies – at FTT19 this November.
