Money20/20 Special: eToro CEO Talks Empowerment Through Ownership

Earlier this week, Money20/20’s latest in-person conference was held October 24-27 at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Amid the recognition and networking, Benzinga had the opportunity to speak with Lule Demmissie, the chief executive officer at eToro, a social trading and investing platform.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Q: You were transforming Ally, scaling its investment business. Why the move to eToro?

A: I felt like the world was going asymmetric but financial institutions were not.

When eToro called, I realized the vision they had was to essentially turn the balance of their business focusing a lot on the U.S. and essentially, in the next three to four years, make the U.S. the largest part of the book, if you will.

If they win here, it’ll be easy for them to replicate in other places where the capital markets adoption is just not as mature.

Understanding that was an ambitious goal was exciting to me.

What’s your focus at eToro and how do you drive participation on the platform?

I really do believe in the wisdom of the crowd.

The fact that [eToro] had social at the heart of it, to me, was recognition; they were bringing in the wisdom of the crowd into the architecture of the product, right, which is phenomenal.

I’m so excited to be figuring out how to make that work within the U.S., whether it is copy trading or Popular Investor.

My vision, one day, is essentially we’re in the U.S. sitting, here, and you’re able to [copy trade] some genius strategist sitting in Nepal somewhere.

Making it possible for a global reach of that talent is a noble endeavor.

What are your thoughts on why retail flocked to meme stocks?

I saw people getting into meme stocks for two reasons.

One, they were making speculative bets.

Second, they had something else to say about how they felt about how the capital markets should work.

How are you catering to investors that are getting methodical about their approaches?

Methodical is our middle name in the sense that when you think about it by definition, to be a person who is copied, you have to have a hypothesis and thesis on investing that is strong.

The way we’ve architected our entire social PI program is a methodical structure. Instead of buying one passive robo, you will have an entire menu of people to pick from.

People don’t want to eat toast anymore. They want to have a method but also do all these other things.

What’s the value-add that eToro can bring?

We think our differentiation is the combo of social investing, copy and multi assets in one dashboard.

The copy part is really critical because one of the things that I found about investors is I can educate them all they want. But, if I don’t give them a button to make it easy, forget about it.

It’s this idea of figuring out how to make doing something good for yourself easy to do.

Reaching the underserved. How do you do it?

Making sure that we have a presence from a marketing and social perspective here in the U.S.

We’re not shy about spending marketing and education dollars to be able to do that.

Also, who is saying those words, as we extend our marketing and education arm? Do they look different and are we showing a rainbow nation, if you will?

Ownership creates empowerment.