Sharesies Makes Moves Into Kiwisaver, Savings & Capital Raising

Sharesies Is Making All The Right Moves

Sharesies started in 2017 by making investing in the stock market a magnitude of order more accessible for your average retail investor.

Before they came along, in New Zealand, you had to open a brokerage account with a firm like Forsyth Barr (an ordeal in itself) and email your broker whenever you wanted to make a purchase order, which usually cost ~$40 for a single share purchase.

Their business model is simple: they replaced the broker with an effortless and cheap-to-use app - putting themselves in the middle of millions of share market transactions for 500,000+ retail investors.

This gives them massive leverage when they market new financial products and services.

In recent months Sharsies have announced pending moves into Kiwi saver, savings accounts and now capital raising services.

This week we received emails from Sharesies about rights offers for Ryman Healthcare and Truscreen group. With that one move, Sharesies or their app are now investment bankers for some of New Zealand's most prominent companies with the largest database of retail investors in New Zealand and the most frictionless route to their money.

Your standard investment banker charges 3.5 to 7% for this book-building service. Given that Ryman is looking to raise $902 million, that's a hell of a new income stream for the brokerage app launched just 5 years ago with a few thousand investors and an index fund.

Our Take:

What's interesting here is the leverage sharesies has built by capturing that massive retail audience with a limited and not even innovative first product (they licensed the market-making technology from another company and just put a user-friendly face on it).

Their app is excellent but not a sustainable competitive moat. However, their audience is a different story.

Aside from a few social networks, they've built the largest captive audience of any platform in New Zealand, who trust them to handle their finances. And now they can tap into that audience with any remotely relevant financial offering.

That is dam near-perfect execution of the wedge strategy by Sonya, Brooke, Leighton & co.

We'd love to see them enter the crowdfunding market next. If the Snowball effect isn't already - they should be watching.

Who would have thought government lobbying services could come anything close to resembling a product...

STARTUPNEWS

Femmi Wins Jaguar She Sets The Pace Grant

Femmi, the women-led fitness start-up tackling gender inequality issues in professional sports, is the latest company to receive the Jaguar she sets the pace grant.

Femmi's mission, as they put it, is to inspire and educate its community to feel empowered within their bodies through knowledge, movement and connection.

The first major challenge they are tackling is the stigma and or lack of education around women's periods in sports.

Femmi says, "most diets and training approaches that work well for men and promoted as good for everyone have negative effects on women's health, sustainability in sport and hormonal health in their reproductive years."

So they are building an online community for female athletes and supporting them with female-specific education about sports training supported by 1:1 training.

They now have 12 coaches on board and train 200+ female athletes across 8 countries. And are supported by medical experts — endocrinologist Dr Izzy Smith, dietician Sara Widdowon, physiotherapist Grace Coombes and provisional psychologist Lilli Burdon.

Next on their to-do list, which they hope the jaguar grant will cover, is building an APP slash digital home for their athletes. Giving them faster and simpler access to the tools, coaching and events that Femmi provides.

Our Take:

Women-only gyms have been a thing for ages now and have done okay. However, they still push the same training routines and ethos primarily developed for men.

So it's easy to see what the value proposition of Femmi is for their female athletes.

Femmi is another example of building a business from insights about an underserved group of people in an industry. You'd have to think there are many more opportunities to disrupt industries where women are underserved.