There’s too much for me to reply to here without further input from my colleagues and maybe some organisation of my own thoughts … but this is very exciting to read.
I just wanted to address one particular question which has come up a couple of times in order to keep the conversation on track.
The answer is categorically not Day Traders!
Our goal is to create Financial Wellness for a much wider group of people that have not had access to financial services that are often limited to those with much greater assets - which means you need money to make money and feel secure.
Dozens aims to innovate in the financial services we offer to a new audience, but also those who appreciate what we stand for and are trying to achieve (by, for example, creating a brand driven not by increasing credit but helping customers build their assets for the long term).
So, we will definitely want to make sure we do not exclude customers with existing investments and experience, but we are mainly focused on those who are only getting started.
We are not interested in entering a market to help customers take further risks with their money through buying individual shares, carry out ‘day trading’ or other such trading (as opposed to investing). The fact is that too many UK customers are already too used to conflating ‘investing’ with ‘trading’ and so are not looking after their own future interests.
We are still a small and young business. There are lots of plans we would love to bring to market, but not everything can be done at our scale, and without securing adequate funding. That is what we are working on while we also build the technical infrastructure, and yet we’ve achieved a lot in a short time - if nothing else to have a community like this, with participants like you having useful conversations.
This thread is incredibly useful to see what it is that interests and motivates our customers, so we really appreciate it and can assure you we will be reading it with great interest. I will also try to arrange the recording (or even live) conversation with our CEO @AC soon - so we can maybe go over these ideas and give you feedback from the very top. Keep an eye on the askac plans for this.