Meet Front, The Fintech That Gives You A Credit Score For Your Investing Portfolio

When the economy is booming, as an uninformed retail investor, you’re the last to win and the first to lose.

That is according to Bam Azizi, the CEO and co-founder at Front, a companion to platforms like Robinhood Markets Inc HOOD and Coinbase Global Inc COIN that helps investors form better investment decisions.

In light of the firm’s hypergrowth, Benzinga spoke with Azizi about how Front plans to put more users on a path to financial independence.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Q: Thanks again for taking the time to speak with Benzinga today. Care to start off with an introduction?

A: I have a Ph.D. in computer science; I’m a data scientist and entrepreneur at heart.

After working around robotics and AI, I decided to tackle one of the most challenging problems.

These were passwords for the modern era.

When my company [NoPassword] was acquired by LogMeIn, I started Front to use my knowledge and expertise in the data science field to help retail investors.

Can you go more in-depth on the motivations behind Front?

I was kind of annoyed by the status quo and establishment of financial service providers.

They were providing services [that weren't] positively impacting user lives. I wanted to change the dynamic and build a tool that enables investors to become a better version of themselves.

A good way that we can be still for-profit and make money while helping users is by becoming a financial advisory platform, not a broker-dealer, because there is an inherent conflict of interest between broker-dealers and investors.

Retail investors have access to the market like never before [because] all of these fintech companies disrupted the execution piece, because that’s where the money was.

Then there is the data side, and we did it in a gamified way.

Tell me about the core offering.

We built a proprietary tool called Front Score, a credit score that basically helps you understand the health of your portfolio.

Each asset has its own Front Score so you can compare apples to apples — for example, if one asset is good for your portfolio or not.

We then went beyond that, scraped the web and found all the 13-F filings of celebrities and gave them a score as well.

So, you can compare yourself with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

We also have a community section where users share their ideas and opinions.

We launched in August and so far we have more than 30-35,000 monthly active users, and over $500 million in connected assets on the platform.

Versus competitors, what is your core differentiator?

It’s the Front Score.

I see this spectrum. There are some users that are super passive. There are others who are super active, buying and selling on a daily basis.

There is a majority, in the middle, that you want to kind of target.

This majority are not expert investors; they have less than two years of experience, and we need to hold their hand and walk them through.

Front is in a unique position to provide insights for the majority of these users.

What does recent market volatility mean for the growth of your platform?

The stock market doesn’t go up all the time.

We see [volatility] as an opportunity for us, because all we’re saying on the Front platform is monitor your risk. Don’t just look at the rewards section of the investment. Make sure that you have an all-weather type of portfolio.

I don’t believe, even if there is a market correction, that people [rush] to checking and savings cards, in terms of the financial or personal finance perspective.

Tell me about what you’re most looking forward to.

In the next six months, our goal is to have 1 million active users.

With all that data and a good team of data scientists, we can build different models and give back those insights to the community for free.

Building that flywheel that people can contribute their data and get back the fruits of that data that they’re providing is something I’m super excited about.