BDO Fintech Galaxy Challenge Finalists Pitch - Sarwa

But you should've done same blastin.

Madness. Yes.

All right, so with that I'll introduce myself. My name is Mark Chahwan, co-founder and CEO of Sarwa. As you can see from the video, the link we're trying to make here is how a startup is so limited on resources, but it's really amazing through when people come together as a team, even with limited resources, within six months with the right passion and dedication and even a little amount of funding, what we can do. Today we're going to show you how we're tackling financial inclusion in the area of wealth management. And of course it takes a lot of dedication, but it also takes a lot of alliances when you're tackling such a big problem. So the team is made up of — just a quick background about myself — hedge fund developers, a financial advisor, and some marketers. On our board, it's very UAE-focused people that know the region really well, know financial services, and these are people that really believe that robo-advisory should definitely be in this market. So let's talk about the problem that we're solving. Essentially, if we look at the wealth management landscape, it started in the 1980s as mutual funds, went into brokerage ETFs, and in the 2010s you started seeing robo-advisors. And today we have more than 200 billion in them. And the UAE, we're still in the 1990s. And it's really crazy because from a financial inclusion perspective, it doesn't mean it's about the unbanked; it's actually people like us in the room as well, because we don't know what low fees are, we don't know what transparent pricing is, we don't know what a nice user experience is. So while there's a lot of really good solutions, we don't have anything in the UAE that lives up to that. So until now, you see a lot of robo-advisors that are making investing easier, more affordable. And today we want to fill that gap and put the FinTech scene of the UAE on the map. So the use case we solve for is typically a young professional, like Raquel that works at BCG. But from our current traction, it's actually much more than that. It's about young families, young parents that want to save for their kids, that are leading busy lives and don't want to go through the hassle of finding the right investment solution and the advice. So the gap is really between someone that finds investing confusing with no guidance, and wealth managers that are too expensive and inaccessible with hundred thousand plus minimums. So from a user experience, if you want to go through the hassle of investing, you don't know where to start. Today it's very difficult to choose the right investments, it's very difficult to understand speculation versus investing, where to start. It's also very archaic process. If you try to open an online banking with any of the banks, it's a lot of signing papers still. And on top of that, it can be quite scary where you'll see a lot of dodgy investment traps that could scare you away from it altogether. So the solution is something that we discussed today, which is AI using algorithms to be able to make the whole process a lot easier, through on-demand human advice as well as optimally reallocating the portfolio. Today we can see what it looks like. Let's build your wealth. Start by creating an account and see how easy it is to get started in three simple steps. Step one: answer a quick questionnaire so we can assess your risk and profile. We'll build you a custom globally diversified portfolio. Confirm it or talk to us if you're not sure what this all means. Step two: set up your investment accounts by telling us more about yourself. Simply choose an account type, fill out some details, and complete the investor contract. Step three: let's put your money to work by funding your account. Link your account to your bank to complete the process from the comfort of your couch. Enter the starting amount and the frequency of future deposits to build your wealth over time. You're all set. Through Sarwa's dashboard, you can manage your accounts, track your goals, and see how much wealth you accumulate. We make it simple to watch your wealth potential through our simulator. Want more details? Click on your accounts to see performance, holdings, and other information. More hands-off? Put everything on cruise control and never think about it again. So essentially, since we've launched in February, we were able to go through five cycles of iteration.

Yeah, it's a great question. And how much money would they want to put onto the platform? Yeah, a great question. While we were launching and through the FinTech Hive, we were able to grow a waitlist. Actually, as of today, we have three hundred thousand assets invested. So initially, because of regulatory concerns — not concerns, but testing — we were slowing down that growth, and more and more we're lifting it. So up to now, it's been very controlled, a lot of cycles again to make it operational. The typical behavior we're seeing: people want to start with two thousand or five thousand dollars and then set up monthly contributions after that on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Differentiating back? Yeah, the differentiating factor — I'll take too long, but essentially if someone knows how to invest, the service becomes all about the hassle-free investing. On an ongoing basis, you don't need to monitor markets. The algorithm will optimally rebalance it back to your risk profile. So if you love investing, don't use Sarwa. If you want what good investing is — the passive way, diversification, etc. — but you don't want to monitor it, that's where the service comes in and fills that. As markets fluctuate, you don't need to watch it. You can drown out all the noise and make sure that you're always optimally diversified.

Yeah, it's a great question. So you completely need it. Some people are almost waiting for this, others are quite more timid. So our approach is free lunch and learns that we're doing. We have lunch and learns at our offices at the FinTech Hive as well as at companies. So we go in, we serve croissant and coffee, usually about 20 to 30 people, and we're having these seminars where we talk about the four rules of investing: things like diversification, why you should start early, what's a low fee, what's a transparent fee. And in parallel, we're doing it all digital. So we're launching a series of videos that explain these. So it's a mix of one-on-ones, one-to-many, and digital that is all about giving value before they sign up as a client.