Strabo’s Ben Waterman is Modernizing Wealth Management for the Discerning Investor

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ben Waterman, the CEO & co-founder of Strabo, a wealth analytics & portfolio tracking platform for consumers, families, and financial advisers.

Ben was originally a professional athlete, having competed on the track for England & Great Britain for a number of years before moving into the City, managing high-net-worth individuals’ investments for a European bank. While there, he noticed the distinct lack of digitization and reliance on legacy systems, making it difficult for new, younger clients to feel welcome.

After a stint working in impact VC and a postgraduate degree at Oxford, he decided to return to the idea and set about building a customizable investment management platform for consumers to better manage their finances across different countries and asset classes.

What are you up to at the moment?

We’re actually fundraising for Strabo’s seed round! We’re always on the lookout for strategic investors and maintain really low ticket sizes so as not to discourage anyone from participating — many of our users are also investors. If that’s you, please get in touch at ben@strabo.app.

What motivated you to launch your startup?

To be honest, I really felt that the wealth management industry was one of the last remaining pillars of traditional old finance that had yet to be modernized. The wealthy people of today and tomorrow, who are able to build wealth much younger than previous generations due to the advent of new technologies, are simply unwilling to have their money managed using outdated practices and software.

Changing this across an industry propped up by hundreds of years of hubris is no small task! So we felt it would be best to prove the product on the consumer side and then move towards families and investment advisers after that.

What is it that excites you about what you’re building?

Managing money is something that almost everyone on the planet can relate to. Everyone feels slightly different about it and there are hundreds of different solutions that cater to people’s needs. By building something fully customizable, we’re catering to the misfits and nomads as well as the domestic elites who have their pick.

Cheap consumer software is a leveler, and it’s really exciting for us to be able to build something that evens out the playing field.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?

B2C marketing is very expensive! Reaching a consumer segment that is one of the most sophisticated of all is difficult, and people need to trust an application that they’re sharing sensitive financial information with. Neither of those things is particularly conducive to a small company with a tiny or non-existent marketing budget. So reaching and converting them requires some creativity!

What are your future plans for your startup?

We are wholly focused on building an application that is an absolute pleasure to use, far better than everything out there. This has to happen on both the consumer and the adviser side, in order to build a seamless experience for both, from weekly email reporting to the exportable widgets in the app to the application on your phone.

Beyond that, everything else will fall into place by itself!

If you had to share “words of wisdom” with a founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?

There is nothing I can say that hasn’t been said before by far more eloquent and accomplished founders. That being said, it is imperative to spend as much time as possible talking to users — the biggest risk is spending too much time building features that people don’t actually want.

It’s a very easy trap to fall into when you have a clear vision for how you expect the product and company to pan out. But the best-laid plans often go awry.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can keep up to date with our progress @yourstrabo on all socials, and we post bi-weekly product updates to our website and community forum. Thanks for checking us out!

This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!