“Bloomberg Terminal” for Everyone
If there is one thing to remember about Genuine Impact, it’s gotta be that we are making the “Bloomberg Terminal” affordable and accessible to all.
Why a $6 trillion asset manager like BlackRock has always to be smarter than you and me? What’s so special and elite about them? To research and analyze Amazon, you don’t need to befriend with Jeff Bezos, nor you need to have millions to invest.
This is what we are after. Building a financial terminal that empowers DIY investors with the best possible insights and intelligence.
What does Genuine Impact do?
We are the new generation financial terminal for DIY investors. We make DIY investors more efficient through our convenient and affordable app-based products. Bloomberg is $25,000 a year. We are just £240, only 1% of the cost.
What do we want to achieve?
Empower DIY investors to be as capable as elite institutional investors. We will level the playing field between the two.
As someone who used to work at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $6 trillion assets under management, we want everyone to have the confidence, capability and efficiency to invest like BlackRock.
What’s the founding story?
Two co-founders Truman and Yuchen had lunch next to Bloomberg’s new office near London Cannon Street which they spent $1 billion constructing. As equity investors themselves, curiosity led them to research about Bloomberg. Great company with $10 billion revenue and very high-profit margin. However Bloomberg Terminal is only for institutions and prices out all the DIY investors. This makes us think if the same can be done in direct-to-consumer space.
While working at BlackRock and Investec Asset Management, the end of every year some of my friends asked me about what they should invest for the coming year. I start to wonder if there is a market where individuals will value high-quality investment intelligence. That is how we formed the business idea initially.
Why the name Genuine Impact?
Genuine is my favorite word. It is the attitude about everything. Impact is what we want to achieve, our results-oriented mindset. We not only want to create a genuine impact commercially and socially, but it is also our attitude to life, company culture, colleagues and our community.
Who are the founders?
Truman, Yuchen and Alister are co-founders. Truman and Yuchen were born and raised in China and later educated in US and UK. They met each other at BlackRock where Yuchen is a portfolio manager and Truman is a research analyst.
Alister is a self-taught software developer with 13 years of experience. Al chose not to attend university and went straight to become a software developer after high school.
What is the vision of Genuine Impact?
Empower individuals to make better investment decisions with powerful and digestible investment intelligence. Just like Google who made information on the web universally accessible, and Booking.com who made hotel booking a smooth user experience, we want to achieve the same in fund and stock investing. Hopefully one day, with the omnipresence of data and technology, wealth inequality gap can narrow, which is our ultimate vision.
Who are your customers?
Mass premium DIY investors. The typical profile is 30+ years old and has 20,000+GBP investable assets. DIY investor in the UK is 4.7M, 54M in US and 140M in China.
What problems you are solving?
The biggest problem we are solving is the mismatch between the demand from individual investors and the supply of high-quality investment intelligence. The vast majority of the population is under-served of a high-quality intelligence app that helps them reach the best investment decision that fits them the most.
Also, customers are rather “indulged” with all the newly launched trading apps which make buying and selling shares extremely convenient, easy and affordable. However, one whitespace is that DIY investors lack the investment skills and tools to help them better invest. This is the problem we will solve.
What is unique about Genuine Impact?
We focus on contents and intelligence as opposed to transaction or managing other people’s money. The core of what we do is fiduciary, impartial and independent. This is quite different from existing business models in financial services such as brokers and financial advisors.
We will complement brokers and advisory firms to act as an intelligence provider, to better serve clients. Users do research with us and trade with their brokers. We act as the “brain” for users, which is difficult to get from a broker company.
Performance to date
Within just 4 months since founded, we launched our beta app in both iOS and Android. The app provides automated stock and fund analysis, portfolio management tools and investment insights.
The app has now 600 users in more than 25 different countries.
We just signed a long term partnership agreement with one of the leading asset managers in China. This will give us a unique expansion opportunity as a UK based fintech, into the largest DIY investing market globally.
Plans for future
After bootstrapping the company so far, we are going to Crowdcube to raise our first external funding. There are many exciting features on our product roadmap. First is to upgrade the beta app into an official production quality app with many more exciting features such as broker account integration, investor chatroom and investment research.
And our growth is not just about the product, but also in new regions. We are expanding into Asia through partnerships to serve the large yet untapped retail markets there. One great thing about our business model is that it is highly scalable in multiple regions.
Join our journey
I firmly believe that the interests of our users, investors and employees should all be aligned equally. This is why we are crowdfunding. You will have the great opportunity to invest in our company with exciting growth potential at such an early phase. We look forward to creating Genuine Impact together with you.
Truman Du
CEO, co-founder
Genuine Impact
