Michael Chojnacki of Closir

Today on Fintech Profile, we talk with one of the Founders of Closir, Michael Chojnacki. Closir is the world’s first dedicated investor relations platform, offering companies and investors a new way to discover, connect and engage with each other.

Our questions are in bold.

Let’s get started — over to Michael…

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Who are you and what’s your background?
After graduating, Michael Chojnacki, Tim Greer and Andre Powers began their careers working for some of the largest financial institutions in the world in London and New York City. Whilst working with institutional investors and listed companies, they realised that the process of how investors learn and engage with companies is often delivered by gatekeepers and middlemen, expensive terminals, legacy systems, and personal connections. They soon learned how expensive, opaque and inefficient this process can be for both companies and investors. The idea for Closir was born: to create an exceptionally engineered online platform to bring investors and companies closer together, on a truly global scale. They partnered with their university colleagues Rastko and Aleksa and embarked on an exciting project.

2. What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?
As a CEO, I am broadly responsible for understanding the market opportunity for the company, shaping its overall strategy and attracting and retaining the best talent in the industry to execute on it.

3. Can you give us an overview of your business?
Our platform provides companies with a simple and beautifully designed template to tell their investment story, target and extend their reach with global institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, pension funds and family offices. For those investors, Closir provides a standardised way to track company disclosure and manage engagement with their current and prospective investments. Closir’s proprietary data and analytics provide the investment community and IR teams insights for better decision making.

4. Tell us how you are funded.
Funded by founders

5. Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?.
We are working on a technology which helps listed companies and professional investors discover, connect and engage with each other. We are doing this because we believe that the current tools companies and investors use are limiting and will be unable to address the growing investor opportunity of tomorrow. We feel that technology can play a part to bridge this gap.

Dashboard of Closir

6. Who are your target customers? What’s your revenue model?
Our target customers for now are listed companies in Emerging Markets and institutional investors interested in studying opportunities in those countries.

7. If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?
We are enthusiastic about a number of initiatives in London which are promoting the Fintech scene and bringing entrepreneurs closer to financial institutions and regulators. We continue to play a part in the debate and hope to see more progress in this field over the next few years.

8. What is your message for the larger players in the Finance industry?
We are already working with a number of large institutions in our industry and look forward to continue to build on those partnerships and explore how technology can help address some of the opportunities.

9. What phone are you carrying and why?
iPhone 5 – great design and functionality

10. Where do you get your industry news from?
Twitter, FT, NYT & The Economist

11. What’s the best FinTech product or service you’ve seen recently?
Nutmeg, Stockviews, Heckyl

12. Finally, let’s talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?
I think a number of large trends will continue to present opportunities for the Fintech space. For example, a few that we are watching

– Emerging Market to Emerging Market trade
– Continued global diversification of institutional portfolios
– Democratisation of Finance
– Role of technology in primary and secondary equity markets
– Opportunities arising from regulatory developments in the sell-side.

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Thank you very much, Michael, for taking the time to answer our questions. You can follow Closir on twitter @closir.

If you’ve any suggestions for other hot FinTech companies (startup, or established ventures) that we should be profiling, I’m all ears. Don’t hesitate to drop me a note at ewan@fintechprofile.com. There’s more information on this page.