Sharesight at CEBIT Australia 2019

Sharesight CEO Doug Morris was invited to present at CEBIT Australia 2019 as part of the Transformation track on ‘How to build a successful fintech company'. Presenting to an intimate audience at the event Doug shared his experience managing the Sharesight team and growing the company to its current position in the Aus/NZ fintech community, with a particular focus on:

• How fintech is changing the traditional landscape for investors

• The importance of open APIs

• How to leverage crowdfunding to raise capital

How to build a successful fintech company

Kicking off the presentation, Doug busted the myth that ‘fintech’ is only a new invention, with technology combining with finance across a number of applications in ways that could be described as ‘fintech’ as far back and further than the 1950s with the introduction of the credit card by diners club.

FinTech has always been scrappy

Doug got his start at Morningstar, and recounted a tale illustrating the issues the firm had when digitising the Morningstar Mutual Fund Sourcebook to CD, they found that clients didn't have CD drives, necessitating the need to bundle these with subscriptions.

Fintech has strong interest from investors

According to KPMG there's been 'strong interest' in FinTech at almost $40 billion invested globally, but compared to the market cap of just one company - Microsoft at over $1 trillion - this is a drop in the ocean.

If you look at the top performing S&P 500 companies, it’s dominated by tech, but other than Paypal there is very little to call ‘fintech’.. yet.

Lessons in how to create a successful fintech

When discussing lessons Doug has learnt in building a successful fintech:

• Find a problem to solve

• It’s great if it’s a serious use case and a boring problem you can sell picks to the gold miners

Mistakes to avoid:

• Avoid a build it they will come fallacy

• Assume you can build everything yourselves - it’s often better in both the short and long run to leverage other partners for non core parts of your business

Fintech is perfect for crowdfunding

Your userbase are often investors themselves, when your customers understand finance and the problem being solved crowdfunding makes particular sense.

Investors love fintech solutions like Sharesight

Sharesight was built for the needs of investors like you in mind, and makes it easy to keep track of your investment portfolio. Here’s how:

• Automatically track your daily price & currency fluctuations, and handle corporate actions such as share splits.

• Run powerful tax reports built for Australian investors, including Capital Gains Tax, Unrealised Capital Gains, and Taxable Income

• See upcoming dividend payments with the Future Income Report.

• Get the full picture of your investment performance, including the impact of brokerage fees, dividends, and capital gains with Sharesight’s annualised performance calculation methodology.

FURTHER READING

• Should you invest in early-stage companies or VC funds?

• 8 tips to get your portfolio on track today

• Does your investment portfolio match your appetite for risk?

• 5 ways to maximise returns in a low-return world