Fintech Focus Roundup For October 24, 2020

Stox App Brings Simplicity To Portfolio Tracking

The Nitty-Gritty: Oftentimes traditional portfolio tracking tools are complex and difficult to navigate. That’s according to Baran Özmen, who founded Stox after personal difficulties managing investments.

“I tried it all,” the founder said. “The platforms usually had horrible tracking capabilities and were mostly focused for older guys with high subscriptions.”

In light of his challenges, Özmen developed an intuitive app to visualize movements in global assets, track portfolios, as well as read up on financial metrics and news.

“We released in mid-June and reached 4,000 downloads on a very low marketing budget,” he noted. “Though we’re having good reviews, we want to build this into a much more sophisticated product for subscription users, but, at the same time, keep the simplicity for average, or beginner users.”

The subscription model, according to Özmen will provide Stox the ability to reinvest and improve product functionality as the company undergoes licensing to become a brokerage.

Xformative Brings Cloud Modularity To Finance

The Problem: Much of the existing payments infrastructure lacks integrated modularity.

The Solution: Founded in 2016, Xformative Payment Systems brings modularity to payments through cloud-native modular APIs. The company’s technology eliminates processor limitations through APIs for card management, tokenization, transaction processing, accounting, and network gateways, among other things.

In the simplest way possible: Xformative is a modern issuer processor payment platform.

“The fact that we’re cloud-native and modular are probably the two most important things,” said CEO Brad Bialas. “Organizations are looking for modular players, like Xformative, where they can integrate to the important things they need to deliver their product.”

TIKR Is Not Your Typical Bloomberg Alternative

The Problem: Traditional platforms for fundamental-focused investing are costly and don’t cater to the needs of sophisticated individual investors.

The Solution: Filling the gap between institutions and retail investors is TIKR, a research platform with S&P Capital IQ-powered data on over 50,000 global companies. In the simplest way possible: TIKR’s end-to-end platform democratizes access to institutional-grade insights Wall Street has used for decades to analyze investments.

“Speaking to our target customers, it seemed like a lot of those individual investors sort of had to piece together this data from a lot of different websites, and the quality of the data they had access to was not quite at that institutional level,” Bobby Sankhagowit, the founder at TIKR said.

“We’re trying to bring those high-quality resources that Wall Street has used for many years to the individual investor."

Rocket Demo Day Awards Detroit Entrepreneurs

What Happened: Rocket Mortgage, a firm built from the ground up by majority shareholder Dan Gilbert, launched its fourth Demo Day, an annual pitch competition that invests in early stage companies as part of an effort to fuel innovation and entrepreneurship in Detroit.

The event will award over $1 million in funding to 17 companies through grants and interest-free loans. Additionally, Rocket will announce three People’s Choice awards to the company in each category that receives the most audience votes.

Why It Matters: Rocket, alongside the Family of Companies, has invested heavily in philanthropic initiatives and business development in Detroit.

This year’s rebranded Demo Day event, which took place at the State Savings Bank in downtown Detroit, reflects the firm’s dedication to legacy and impact.

“Like all businesses, we have had to implement client-centered safety protocols to make sure our clients don’t just leave feeling great about their hair — but that they leave healthy,” Dana White, owner of Demo Day winner Paralee Boyd, said in a statement.

“Thanks to Rocket Mortgage Detroit Demo Day, we can continue supporting our amazing clients and the ever-changing lifestyles they lead, no matter the environment.”