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We invested in Pynk - And Here is Why

We are excited to announce a new addition to 365.fintech portfolio - Pynk. Our investment comes as a part of a larger $2 million seed round the company has raised with crowdfunding initiatives on Seedrs and FunderBeam. It also marks our first individual investment in the United Kingdom and outside of continental Europe.

Pynk is a 0% Fee wealth management app, powered by the proprietary Wisdom in Crowds AI platform. The AI aims to remove bias of any individual investor by analyzing information from tens of thousands of market participants and identifying the correct predictors and their strategy for a given asset at any point in time. Based on this technology and community in place, Pynk plans to launch a full investor wallet towards the end of 2020.

Pynk at Wolves Summit (source: Wolves Summit)
 

There are several key reasons why Pynk stood out for us in the relatively crowded weath management space:

  • Strong team Pynk has previously won support from the likes of RBS and Natwest, took home the Great Pitch Contest at Wolves Summit in 2019 and 'Best AI Startup' award at AIBC Summit recently. The awards are a manifestation of a great team - Seth, Rupert and Mark are driven founders who want to realize Pynk's vision to create a more equitable investment platform on a global scale.
  • Community = a hard to replicate differentiator. It is difficult to build a social investing platform without a strong underlying community; yet many startups playing the space claim to be doing precisely this. Pynk is truly and authentically engaged with the community that they are building a product for. More than 40k users from 180 countries on Pynk's investor wallet waiting list prove this point.
  • Fundamentally different business model. Many wealth management startups are stuck in the dreaded CAC/LTV deadlock. Whereas cost of acquiring a customer often rivals that of full-fledged challenger banks, the lifetime value of the customer is limited to the industry standard business model of charging 0.25% of assets under management per annum. Combined with the fleeting millennial customer (and their disposable income to invest) this puts many of the new generation robo advisors and trading apps into the high CAC/low LTV quadrant. Pynk is approaching the business model question from a different angle - with greater focus on b2b and monetizing the underlying data signals from its predicting (and trading) community members.
  • Different take on the product. We think there is quite a lot of cookie-cutting going on on the product proposition level in the wealth management space. Admittedly, it is difficult to innovate beyond the completely free of charge, fractional stock trading and impact portfolio investing propositions. Again, Pynk takes a fundamentally different route. They are rallying a strong community around a captivating hook product and building the value proposition based on sophisticated prediction tech stack - for both retail investors and institutional partners.

Here is what Rupert, co-founder at Pynk had to say about our involvement "We are delighted to be partnering with 365.fintech, they bring a level of institutional banking knowledge as well connections in a new region for Pynk, something that we would not have been able to achieve alone. We're looking forward to the next 12 months and more exciting developments to come. Watch this space!"

We are looking forward to working with Seth, Rupert and Mark and seeing their vision materialize. Onwards!