Crowdfunding Status in Greece
EU Crowdfunding Workshop 2017, Athens 20.09.2017
Hello. I am Michael, managing director of Crowdpolicy.
We will quickly see some milestones for crowdfunding in Greece, which of course are related to the overall culture of Greeks for participatory processes.
It is about crowd culture.
Crowdpolicy has been working on creating a crowd culture since 2010, when some of us (George, me and others) designed and implemented the most innovative work of transparency in Greece, clarity, or in Greek Diavgeia.
Crowdpolicy founders, Michael Psallidas and George Karamanolis, were integral parts of the OpenGov Initiatives in Greece for the period 2009–2012, having active participation in more than 30 Public Sector Projects.
Di@vgeia program implements one of the major transparency initiatives of the Greek government, ever. Beginning October 1st, 2010, all government institutions are obliged to upload their decisions on the Internet. The decisions of all public entities can not be implemented if they are not uploaded on the Di@vgeia website. This is for public accountability and transparency to the Government’s spending and operation.
That was the first great crowd culture initiative in Greece. Up to now, about five thousand public entities are involved in the platform, and an average of sixteen thousand decisions per day are posted. To date, about 26 million public sector decisions have been posted.
Crowdpolicy was founded in November 2012 with the purpose of providing services and digital platforms for crowd-sourcing.
At that time, the terminology was not well known in Greece, and although several were using applications based on these processes, the terminology was unknown. In order to best describe what we are doing, because still my friends and family don’t understand, I give them the example of facebook and foursquare. That facebook is the largest content provider although they are not producing themselves content at all.
We have worked for several months on crowdsourcing projects. Some of them are civic tech like Synathina which is a platform to stretch the impact of public-spirited citizens to solve local problems and catalyze government transparency and responsiveness. Synathina was awarded from Bloomberg Philanthropies with 1.000.000 euros. Another interesting project was Vouliwatch for bridging the gap between citizens and their political representatives with promoting a culture of transparency, accountability and active citizenship and others.
On March 2015 we implemented our crowdfunding platform for social impact, that was for donation crowdfunding. (Action Africa)
Some months later we launched the platform for public sector, so public entities, local municipalities etc to be able to crowd-fund their projects. This is a huge change in the behaviour of the citizens, when they know that actually they have paid some money for a public infrastructure. (Municipality of Antiparos)
In November 2015, we launched the 1st crowd-resourcing platform, which gave the opportunity to startups to present their ideas and projects, and to be able to find support either in money, in services or in equipment from the public as well as other businesses.
In December 2015 Law 4351 added the possibility for banks to create donation accounts in the context of their corporate social responsibility. So National Bank of Greece, with us, created the act4Greece program and platform, which is the first program of this size to support actions by the public and businesses.
The act4Greece program is a pioneering initiative for the promotion of social and developmental banking. For the first time in Greece, an online platform has been created which enables the gathering of resources from the “crowd”.
The launch of the platform took place in February 2016 in the presence of the Prime Minister, by the ex-Chairman of the Board of Directors Mrs. Louka Katseli, which was the initiator of the program. Back then, National Bank of Greece, was one of the very few banks in Europe running a crowdfunding platform.
Some innovations of the platform were the electronic donation tax receipt, as well as the opencall for proposed actions by anyone interested in uploading to the platform after evaluation by the Strategic Committee of the program.
Since its launch at February 2016, until June 2017, the act4greece platform has supported 15 actions and a total of around € 1.5 million was donated.
Τhe discussion in Greece became more intense and interesting for crowdfunding. Now, it was the turn of the investment crowdfunding.
In September 2016, Law 4416 was adopted, which, in the framework of the MiFID, set the framework for investment crowdfunding in Greece.
The law allowed offered securities of the issuers with a total value of less than five hundred thousand (500,000) euro, per issuer per year. The participation of a private client, may not exceed five thousand (5,000) euro or ten per cent (10%) of the average of the income for the past three years, per issuer and thirty thousand (30,000) euro totally per year, per broker or credit institution.
In July 2017, we got the 1st license from the Capital Market Commission together with a partner for an investment platform that will come out, hellasfund. In addition, we have worked together with the National Bank of Greece, for its own investment platform, the i-fund, which is technically ready and is waiting the first companies.
In order to promote a crowdfunding culture, we implement open innovation actions — like crowdhackathons — where young people come to compete and are rewarded for their MVPs.
During the last year, 5 large companies have put up bonds to the public, up to € 1000 per person, a process that refers to debt investment crowdfunding. An example is Housemarket (runs 7 IKEA stores in Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria) which proceeded with the issuance of a 5-year Common Bank Loan with a fixed interest rate of 5% per annum, a quarterly interest payment and a participation of € 1,000 per investor. The process ran through banks and stock brokers, and not through on-line systems. All issues were successful and this led to the activation of about 16,000 investors.
One more thing.
We are now implementing the Crowd Budget which is a participatory budget for public and private entities which we plan to give it as open source to the community, so we will ping you when it is available to see it and use it, if you are interested and participate for the localisation and deployment in your countries.
Thank you.
