Today we are celebrating FinTech Profile’s first birthday!
We are delighted with the way the site has taken off and are proud to have profiled over 50 companies since our launch last January. To mark the occasion, we invited James Tuckett of investUP, who contributed our very first profile a year ago today, to give us an update on what they have been doing and their plans for the year ahead.
Over to James…
Starting UP
– the year in review
2015 was a big year for FinTech and an even bigger one for the alternative finance sector. The biggest thing to happen in 2015? Well, other than FinTech Profile kicking off with investUP as its very first profile, it was also the year of our official launch. It’s been a tough ride, as life in every startup is, and, one year on, we’re pleased to have a future that’s looking UP.
Where are we now?
For those who don’t know us, investUP is a crowdfunding & P2P site, which works with now over 23 crowdfunding site partners. The site offers all forms of alternative investing, ranging from invoice trading, P2P lending to early stage equity investing. Alternative investing has grown and grown since the very first crowdfunding sites were launched a few years ago. There are now thousands of deals being offered daily, across a range of crowdfunding sites. There’s no shortage of choice and variety out there for the investor looking to take advantage of these new forms of investing. investUP does not source and create its own deals in-house, but rather promotes deals provided by other crowdfunding sites, allowing investors to find, invest and manage those investments all in one place. Investors can hold investments in two types of account: everyday (non-ISA) and crowdISA (ISA). Essentially we’re a marketplace for crowdfunding and P2P lending.
2015, an UPdate;
2015 was a big year for UP. Aside from our full public launch in early Sept 2015 – UP now has over 23 crowdfunding & P2P partners. We launched our MVP, got a ton of feedback and doubled our team size to 12. Meanwhile we’ve really pushed the business model and got our coding hats firmly back on. We’re now fully regulated by the FCA, the first of our kind of business model to be. The number of crowdfunding sites is increasing all the time and we now host over 100 deals (a typical crowdfunding site has 1-6 at any one time).
UP and away: the future;
If 2015 was all about proving our business model, then 2016 is all about building what we really wanted to initially. We’re gearing UP (sorry) to launch Version 2 of the platform, and adding some features that our regulars have told us would be really useful, such as a Super Slick Search function, social aspects (putting the ‘crowd’ back into crowdfunding) and the introduction of long-term debt (bonds), as well as invoice trading to the platform. 2016 will also see a discretionary index-like option for investors. What we really get excited about though is Robo-lending tools. The majority of people in the UK, if they had the time, understanding and inclination, are potential investors. Our companies mission is to deliver on all three of these fronts, and Robo-lending goes some way towards this. Next month we’re heading back to Finovate Europe in February to launch Version 2 of UP. Watch this space.
We can’t wait to be back here in 2017 and tell you how it’s all gone. This year promises to be a busy one!
To connect with James, you can reach out to him on Twitter (@JWTuckett) and you can find him on LinkedIn here. For more information on investUP – take a look at their web site here.
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