Meet Sharesies, The Investment App Tailored For Millennials

Benzinga will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on Nov. 10, 2020.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga chatted with Leighton Roberts, co-founder and co-CEO at Sharesies.

About Sharesies

New Zealand has a love affair with hard assets, specifically real estate.

That’s according to Roberts, who says the classic investment vehicle has turned difficult for younger generations to invest in.

“Our property market is several times larger than our capital markets, which is absurd and really odd for any country in the OECD,” he said. “At the same time, the housing market has gone through the roof, so a whole generation feels like they’re getting locked out of being able to buy a house.”

Founded in 2016, Sharesies is a fintech specializing in democratized stock market investing. The company is one of many other brokers that have popped up around the world, helping unlock low-cost access to listed companies and funds.

The idea behind the company, Roberts told Benzinga, resulted from his team’s rejection of the notion that millennials can’t afford investments due to their comfortable spending habits.

“There was an article in one of the big papers about how millennials would be able to buy a house if they just stopped eating smashed avocado and toast,” he said.

“We were like: ‘Why can’t we have our investments and eat our smashed avocado and toast.’ That’s how it started.”

Core Product Portfolio

“You have to be experts in finance. You have to be experts in technology. And you have to be experts in design. If you can do those three things, then you’ll be able to really democratize and disrupt this industry.”

Sharesies comes as an end-to-end, consumer-focused broker built on deep know-how and passion. After going through a local-area fintech accelerator, the firm launched as a fully regulated and licensed broker with an offering of six ETFs.

Though the offer was limited at first, it allowed Sharesies to demonstrate proof of concept. After receiving positive feedback on its investment experience, Sharesies went live, allowing users access to companies and funds in New Zealand and the United States.

In covering user costs related to custody, administration, and taxes, Sharesies offers multiple pricing structures which can broaden the available feature set to include sophisticated charting, advanced market depth, and corporate actions, including local public offerings.

“Confidence and motivation is our life's work,” Roberts added in a discussion regarding access to tools that enable automated, emotion-free investing capabilities. “The vision for Sharesies is to make the same opportunities available, regardless of how much money you’ve got.”

Use Case, Recent Developments

Alongside the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, market participants, sheltered at home, fueled an impressive rise in retail trading activity as they searched for new forms of engagement.

Sharesies was a beneficiary of this engagement, nearly doubling its user base over the past year.

“We went into lockdown at the end of March with about 95,000 investors on the platform, and now we have just over 240,000.”

The path to growth wasn’t easy, though. The initial drop in global financial markets on news of the pandemic preceded a panic reaction. That’s when Sharesies amped up its media initiatives, assuring investors that wealth is built over the long-term, through its Lunch Money newsletter, podcast, and various social pages.

“We mitigated the immediate panic reaction,” he said. “We wrote a letter to our investors during that time, … and, as it turns out, people sniffed an opportunity and started flooding money.”

Innovation Outlook

“Whether you got $5 or $500,000, we think you should have the same access to information.”

Going forward, through a focus on technology and various education initiatives, Sharesies aims to provide a different, more engaging way for investors to develop wealth. In the coming months, Roberts suggested the firm will look to opportunities for expansion beyond New Zealand.

“We want to be a global company,” he said. “We think there's a big opportunity in New Zealand, Australia, and some other places in the Asia Pacific.”