I came across the FinTech start-up Finimize a few months ago and quickly became a reader of their ‘easy-to-digest’ daily financial news service. Their daily global edition email, which highlights each day’s key events relevant to the financial markets, has since become the one financial news update I read on a daily basis. Hence, I wanted to find out more about Finimize, their company vision and where they are heading in 2016, as I believe their service adds massive value to those looking to learn more about investing and the financial markets.
On February 29th I had the pleasure to interview Scott Tindle, co-founder of Finimize.
Could you tell me a bit about your and co-founder’s background and how you came up with the idea for Finimize? [Alex Lielacher]
Max Rofagha and myself founded Finimize in 2015. The way it started was that Max was looking to learn how to invest. However, he struggled to find good resources to teach him more about investing, and found reading financial newspapers to be rather dull and not as educational as he hoped. So, as a ‘start-up guy’, he did what ‘start-up guys’ do. He wanted to create a solution to that problem.
Around that time I had just left banking, where I worked in London as a bond salesman for 7 years, and was looking to start my own entrepreneurial ventures.
Finimize was launched with the aim to make finance and investing more accessible for millennials. Finimize’s pocket-sized financial news email service was launched shortly thereafter. [Scott Tindle]
Have you faced any major challenges so far as a young FinTech start-up or has everything been going smoothly since you launched? [Alex Lielacher]
Finimize has been going very well since the start, as we have a strong USP and there are not many other companies providing this sort of service. Our mix of providing two market-moving news articles per day, and explaining why they are important and how they affect the market, has been well received by our readers. The feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive since the launch and we hope to keep that momentum going.
Since, launching we have also added new features to our daily news email such as user’s abilities to tweet a daily café recommendation and a daily ‘Finimize quote’ which are featured in the newsletter. We strongly encourage users to ask questions and we respond to every single one – and highlight one per day in the email. [Scott Tindle]
What milestones have you hit since launching? [Alex Lielacher]
I would say the two big milestones we have hit were major user growth targets and high user engagement. We receive several emails a day with questions of users about the financial markets, investment concepts and other finance-related topics.
What will the future look like for Finimize? What it’s the pipeline that you feel comfortable sharing? [Alex Lielacher]
Our mission statement is that we want to make finance more accessible for millennials. Hence, we want to add further services to our platform, including more in-depth content 
that will help our users to understand the world of finance better. Eventually, we want to add even more services – but always with our main aim in mind. [Scott Tindle]
Where do you see the future of FinTech? Do you think the FinTech boom will have longevity or will it be rather short-lived? [Alex Lielacher]
FinTech is still in it infancy and I believe the trend for innovation in finance is very good, as the tech industry is late to the game when it comes to finance. Particularly, actually, on the consumer facing side where there is a lot of room for technology companies to service customers. I think technology will increasingly revolutionize banking. While barriers to entry are quite high in finance, due to higher capital requirements and regulatory reasons, there are many innovators operating in smaller pods. The best innovators will eventually be incorporated into the banking system, which will benefit the consumer in the long run. So, to answer your question, yes, I think the FinTech boom has longevity. Especially in the U.K. where regulators are rather accommodating and have a good attitude towards FinTech firms. London is competing with other cities to become the FinTech innovation hub of the world and currently, with the help of investors and regulators, it is succeeding at that. We are happy to be a part of this. [Scott Tindle]
At Smart Money Smart Living I want to provide my readers with products and services that make their financial life easier. In my view Finimize does exactly that! It makes financial news easy to understand and makes the world of financial investing more accessible to those who are new to it.
If you want to sign up to Finimize’s pocket-sized financial news service click here.
