Digital Wealth: Social investing app Shares raises $40MM, charges 79 bps
When buying or selling stocks on the Shares app, users can use captions and GIFs to share their views on their investment. The activity feed lets members react to their friends' investments
Before we jump into today’s Digital Wealth issue, let us remind you of something special. On Tuesday, we released the latest issue of the Greatest Hits Report focusing on DAOs.
There are over 4,800 DAOs, with over 3 million members managing more than $10B in assets. Given their importance for the future of Web3, it is important to properly highlight what a DAO is, and explain their architecture.
TIFIN, a wealthtech to connect retail investors, intermediaries, and investment managers, announced its acquisition of Chalice Network, a community of over 60,000 financial advisors. The network provides education, networking, and a marketplace of services to help independent financial professionals (e.g., RIAs, real estate agent, insurance brokers) grow their business. The marketplace includes discounts on services such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, an accounting software for SMBs, LegalShields, an affordable legal protection platform, and more. See here for the full list.
TIFIN is joining the 50 partners that Chalice already has (e.g. Orion, Timber Point Capital Management, Concorde) and will get preferred market access, lead generation, networking and conferences, and thought leadership exposure. Chalice advisors will also get preferred pricing in exchange for promotion of TIFIN’s digital product offering. We cover this after last week’s news of TIFIN partnering with SharingAlpha, a community of 15,000 fund investors, last week (see here).
We think about this type of move through the perspective of finding novel distribution footprints and getting cheap attention. Would be curious to see go-to-market move from more traditional lead gen in marketplaces and towards embedded finance.
London-based investing app Shares raised $40MM in its Series B funding round, led by Valar Ventures, and is now looking at European expansion and a move into crypto. Sounds like a need to print revenue! This brings the firm’s total funding to $90MM — $40MM in its Series A funding round in March, and $10MM in its Seed funding round last August. The hefty numbers are surprising considering the macro environment and the slashed valuations for Fintech companies, but Shares has had a solid start in the UK so far.
The app has 150,000 users within the UK, where they can trade 1,500 stocks with just £1 and fees around 80 bps per trade. Also, when buying or selling stocks, users can use captions and GIFs to share their views on their investment. It’s like a Robinhood and Instagram Frankenchild. The activity feed lets members react to their friends’ investments, making the experience more social, like Venmo.
Shares says that its features make it easier for people to talk about investing, rather than relying on outside platforms such as Reddit and WhatsApp. The reason Reddit is so popular for investing, and almost broke the stock market, is because of the size and engagement within the investing communities (e.g. WallStreetBets has 12MM+ members). As an aside, Coinbase made a comparable social-media-but-also-finance attempt with their NFT platform and it was a disappointment — only about $2.9MM in trading volume since launching in April 20, compared to OpenSea’s $5.9B in trading volume over the same period.
But selling NFTs and putting emojis on your friends’ investment ideas perhaps are quite different levels of financial commitment.
Philippines-based wealth manager, ATRAM Trust Corporation (ATRAM), announced a strategic partnership with wealthtech platform Additiv. ATRAM manages $3B in client assets within its 18 feeder funds, and has two main businesses — (1) wealth management, (minimums of $90K), and (2) fund investing, a range of equity, fixed-income, and multi-asset mutual funds. It is the biggest wealth manager in the country, as the capital markets still have a lot of room to grow. Wealth management clients in the Philippines primarily trust traditional banks to manage their wealth, and 45% of clients assets are tied to fixed income securities.
The ATRAM Alpha Opportunity Fund invests mainly in equity securities, with a focus on hyper-growth companies that are not included in the Philippine Stock Exchange Composite Index. The fund is down 22% YTD. One of ATRAM’s fixed-income funds, the Total Return Dollar Bond Fund invests in a diversified portfolio of long-term and short-term debt securities, and is down 9% YTD. However, this is the experience across the overall market, per BlackRock’s 2022 midyear outlook.
Additiv’s platform consists of various components — its DFS Platform, Embedded Wealth, BaaS, Marketplace, and API catalogue — that power a hybrid wealth manager, a roboadvisor, a risk analytics dashboard, and a credit engine. ATRAM is planning to use Additiv’s Digital Finance Suite, which enables financial service providers like ATRAM to launch personalised wealth and investment services.
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