agustinf

Hey aamatte, why do you charge 95% less than Twilio?

Just wear a couple of white earphones and you won't be judged

I was going to say the same thing. The lack of this feature prevented me from sharing it to my whole company

I'd be happy to introduce you to an engineer I know who is building a very interesting product that is starting to gain some traction. He lacks computer science knowledge/skills to build the backend he needs and would happily share 50% of his startup with someone like you.

Bitcoin layer 2 solutions (i.e. lightning network) don't have this "per transaction" issue, though

But look! https://twitter.com/khannib/status/1116352595537403905?s=19

Probably yes. If you are interested, we are too! Please apply to get to know you. https://fintual.com/steve

Yes, we're aware current incumbents appear to have interest in getting into this space, in fact, people working in some of them have directly gotten in touch with us regarding potential partnerships. Without even mentioning these companies typical technological capacity/skills, my main doubt is how would they solve their ambivalences, because having a roboadvisor of their own would strongly cannibalize their current profit.

Gracias por la buena onda!

Respondiendo punto por punto:

- Usando fondos mutuos podemos pagar rescate de las inversiones en 3 días habiles, fondos de inversión tiene que ser sobre 10 días. Tanto fondos mutuos como de inversión tienen beneficios tributarios, creemos que los que aplican a fondos mutuos responden mucho mejor a inversiones de patrimonios menores a US$500k (en nuestro caso, beneficios como 57 LIR, 108 LIR y APV).

- Tendremos carteras diversificadas (no expuesto a ninguna empresa particular más de 3% por ejemplo), y vamos a ir diversificando más geográficamente a medida que vayamos aumentando la parrilla de ETFs. En la parrilla actual hay ETFs de acciones emergentes, deuda emergente, acciones globales, etc, y el algoritmo de asset allocation es el que elige cual entra y cual no. No han entrado ETFs fuera de US porque probablemente tengamos que aumentar la parrilla con ETFs que cubren zonas más puntuales o correlacionan muy distinto con el mercado de US.

- Cobramos hasta 1,19% de remuneración, puede ser menos. Nosotros cubrimos costos bancarios por transferencia y costos de transacciones de ETFs (corretaje). Lo único que no cubrimos es el management fee de los ETFs contenidos dentro de las carteras, que usualmente es muy bajo.

- Lo que sugerimos es agendar una transferencia programada desde el banco de cada cliente, nosotros detectamos las transferencias y las asociamos automáticamente cuando llegan.

Thanks for recommending our solution to your family! What you say is definitely true. It is really surprising that investment culture and knowledge is so different between countries that in other aspects are not that far appart.

Thanks for your thoughts! Cool insights there. In fact, we do use global ETFs so we do offer diversified exposure. As a regulated entity we are able to allow investment for as low as US$1. We haven't conducted our marketing as Acorns' does, though, because we feel the biggest problem (opportunity) right now is the one that relatively successful professionals in their 30s face: they are able to save money but they have no time to invest it right. You may be right suggesting that getting many small accounts quickly can be a good strategy though, thanks for that idea, will think it through.

About performance, I agree, it will take some time until regular people start noticing the difference.

Yes we are, thanks for your interest! Please take a look at https://fintual.com/steve to see open positions and application instructions. Cheers!

It currently works for Chileans and foreigners that have at least a bank account there. We might get good news from the "Alianza del Pacífico" treaty this year though. Otherwise, we will expand once we get to certain milestones in the current base.

Buenas preguntas, gracias! Para hacer frente a los costos fijos de transferencia lo que hicimos fue juntar el dinero de la gente en 3 fondos:

- Fondo Mutuo Fintual Risky Norris - Fondo Mutuo Fintual Moderate Pitt - Fondo Mutuo Fintual Conservative Clooney

Y asignarle a cada cliente una combinación de estos tres. De esta manera, se pagan comisiones como si fuera un gran cliente. Esto compite muy bien con las alternativas: al menos en Chile estamos listados como la solución retail más económica según El Mercurio Inversiones.

El gran costo inicial que tuvimos que asumir con este approach es el de la regulación, pues como creadores de Fondos Mutuos debemos cumplir con una serie de exigencias, y justamente ahí está la innovación: somos capaces de cumplir con ella sin arrastrar con el costo operativo porque automatizamos casi todos los procesos y la generación de los documentos que requiere la autoridad en nuestro caso no depende de personas.

Thanks! well even though the answer is 'yes the law does require a risk questionnaire' what we've seen with our users is that they actually enjoy answering these questions about themselves. Almost like personality quiz or something ;) You might still be right though, I guess once we get a wider upper funnel we will be able to test this further.

Thanks! I can't see your personal email in your HN profile, please email anything to [email protected] to get your contact! Thanks again!

We launched Chile in March 2018, we plan to reach some milestones first and then move to tackle the next countries. About communication work, sure, we are editing our FAQ just now, so thanks for your feedback. If you find anything else that needs clarification please let us know!

Thanks for noticing!

Yes, we use $ for peso and US$ for dollars because that's what our current customers would expect. We might have to localize the page once we grow.

I feel putting CLP$ would be confusing for them now!

We are going after that same middle-class group to start. It is for sure smaller in purchasing power than the US middle class in total, but competition for this market is also way less, which may allow us to grow faster than a roboadvisor in the US, specially if you take into account that the middle class here is growing.

Anyway, we know we will be able to expand from this market to higher net worth individuals because a good part of them are also being ripped off by banks.

Legally, we cannot say "see, this is Fintual" when referring to the backtest, but we could definitely do the comparison and show how a passive strategy beats most of those yacht hungry managers. Great idea. We have done a simple chart that shows how fees eat people's lunch here https://fintual.com/simulador but we still need to iterate on top of that.

We don't have short term plans to get in Brazil. We met Luciano from Magnetis (https://magnetis.com.br) here in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago and he seems to be doing great there, perhaps you might want to take a look at it.

Chile is a good starting point for us because it has a higher GDP per capita and is highly digitalized. There's a pending treaty called "Pasaporte de fondos" that would in theory allow us to serve people in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru without additional regulation.

About taxes, I think Chile is on the lower-burden side of Latin American countries, but I'm open to hear if you have deeper insights.

Yes, I agree. And to improve financial literacy has proven to be a very hard, there's just too much noise when talking about money. We've seen mutual funds in LATAM charge up to 7% and for some reason nobody seems to care. We are currently tackling the highly educated tier as you say, they care and want to understand, and we believe that this niche might help us expand further.