Seedrs Crowdfunding 2020 - your questions answered

As we’ve previously announced, Project Imagine is very excited to bring you a new Crowdfunding opportunity in 2020.

Past investors, customers, and members of the community may already have read emails about this and maybe even seen the pre-registration pages, if not, please do check out the link below (and join through Seedrs if you find it interesting).

Now, you might have some further questions.

While we can’t share all investor information publicly (this is available to authorised investors on the Seedrs page), we know that quite a lot of questions will actually be about Dozens, our cards, our mission, plans and features - and you might also be interested to know more about Pi1 and other aspects of the Project Imagine family.

Therefore, we want to use this place so you can ask these questions and so we can answer them and let everyone else join the conversation, and also learn from your insights.

Do let us know your questions by posting them below


And to just to be crystal clear about this:

Please note that investing in crowdfunding raises such as this involves risks, including loss of capital, illiquidity, lack of dividends and dilution, and should only be done once you have completed Seedrs’ onboarding process, and read all the documentation provided on the official crowdfunding webpage, including all the risk warning information. Investments should only be made by investors who understand these risks. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and is subject to change in future. This email is not an investment recommendation to you and any investment decision should be made on the basis of the full campaign on Seedrs’ website.

Dozens is a trading name of Project Imagine Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (No. 11153882). We are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority as an e-money institution (FRN 900894) and also as an investment firm (FRN 814281). We are not a bank. Our registered office is at Finsgate, 5-7 Cranwood Street, London, EC1V 9EE.

Seedrs Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 550317) and is registered in England and Wales with registered office at Churchill House, 142-146 Old Street, London, EC1V 9BW.

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Hi

Just had the email in, looking good and exciting times ahead!

Are the perks for this (2nd) round of investment or the total over both rounds?

These are the perks related to amounts invested in this particular round

Will the investors that invested in the first round keep the black card, or do they have to top up their investment to continue eligibility for this - as there is a mastercard to Visa switch as well.

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excellent question @Breyten

Investors from the original crowdfunding round who already had shareholder cards will be eligible for the new Dozens Black cards. We will be sharing more information on these cards and their benefits next week.

As a thank you for your early support, these investors / customers will not need to ‘top-up’ their investment, but if you are a new investor there is a minimum investment threshold to get this perk.

There are other perks though, and to qualify for those, it will only be the new investment amount that will be counted - and there’s plenty of great stuff there too.

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This is an exciting topic! I’m afraid I’m going to ask a lot of questions - please don’t feel obliged to answer them all. Also, sorry to those who can’t see the pitch deck - I’m presuming that it’ll be the same version when public, so you can check out what I’m referring to then…

General questions:

  1. You’re looking to raise £2.5m (I think) which takes you out to May 2021. You say you’re already in discussions for the next round. Why the (conservative?) £2.5m round when you know you need additional funding? What’s the plan if subsequent rounds don’t materialise. Can you pivot / is there a plan B? If not, what is your liquidation strategy?

  2. What is your tech delivery strategy? I think you used to have a Ukrainian partner who owned some of the equity in PI - is that still the case? Can you confirm that you own the IP, and what continuity arrangements are in place?

  3. I recall you previously said that you weren’t interested in consumer lending (so no overdrafts). Is that still the case? How does that factor into the potential for offering mortgages?

  4. Are you confident that you can migrate accounts by the end November (the date for closure of Wirecard services)? If not, what’s your estimate on whether this date could be extended? Or is there a plan B?

  5. What are your thoughts on a banking licence? I think @AC has previously said it only makes sense at a larger scale - is that still the plan? What sort of customer numbers are we looking at?

  6. The app arrived pretty feature complete, with just minor changes since launch. I know that there is a new version planned, but what’s your philosophy on iterative development / public roadmap? Are there big features (like cheque imaging / web interface) that Dozens and/or PI1 customers can look forward to?

  7. You talk about business banking in the pitch deck, but are there other products that you’re exploring under the Dozens (or potentially a new) brand? Anything on joint account / children’s accounts, maybe?

Pitch deck:

  1. What do you mean by a one-stop-shop on slide 13? (I, wrongly, presumed it would be that if all the boxes were ticked).

  2. On slide 16 you show income per customer of $4.11. How is this calculated? Is a breakdown per income source available?

  3. Can you confirm if the average balance figure shown on slide 17 includes money in bonds and in investments?

  4. On slide 25 you say that you’re looking to move into SME banking. Can you break down the development and other costs associated with this? Are the costs already baked into the figures in the deck? When are
    you envisaging launch? What sort of take-up volume are you projecting?

  5. On slide 30 you talk about your aspiration to become ‘the app store for fintech’. I don’t think the details are anywhere in the deck. What’s the ambition here? What form do you envisage this taking?

A cheeky frivolous question:

  1. On slide 5, the black investors card has the yellow “d” - on the pitch page, it looks like the card is dark grey with a black “d” (much more swish, imo). Which one is it?!

I will have more. I’ll probably sit on my hands though! :zipper_mouth_face:

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Me again (sorry). Hands were not sat on. :man_facepalming:

  1. I can’t find the reference, but did I read somewhere that you’re looking at packaged accounts? Or maybe insurance?
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A few questions (to start with!):

  1. How long do you expect this round to remain open?

  2. Is Dozens applying to the Banking Competition Remedies Fund to support its SME proposition?

  3. I understand Dozens is seeking to raise £10m. £2.5m from crowdfunding and the rest from institutional investors. Has this £7.5m been secured?

  4. From the pitch deck (slide 31) I understand the £10m will give Dozens runway until mid 2022.

Can you confirm this is correct as under the “Key information” section in Seedrs it says “With the amount raised as part of this funding round and current cash forecasting, Project Imagine believes it has sufficient cash to support operations through to May 2021.

Which one is correct?

  1. I understand Pi1 wants to be a one stop shop for other firms. Dozens have previously said that you don’t plan to issue a credit card. Can Pi1 do this?

If not, what about potential clients who are looking for both a debit/current account solution as well as a credit card offering?

I note the deck does have a reference to “charge cards” as part of your SME offering sometime in the future (slide 19)…

  1. Is there a recording available of the PI pitch at the Seedrs Bitesize event on 28 October?

  2. Is PI holding another event for investors as part of this fundraise?

  3. What is in the black box of exclusive merch (I hate that phrase) for shareholders?

  4. How large is the exclusive bond issue for investors? Will previous investors be eligible?

  5. Does Bunq really have the same number of customers as Dozens? As they have been going for longer, I would have assumed they would have a larger customer base… (good on Dozens though!)

If you prefer to answer any of these on Seedrs rather then here, that’s not a problem.

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Those must be some warm hands by now @Peter. :slight_smile:

Think, my payback will be the hot fingers am left with, by the time I have finished answering your 14 q’s. :smiley:

Will try my best, and do keep them coming - they are some of the best I have been asked in the past weeks!

  1. Great one to start on - we remain an early-stage startup with significant equity and liquidity risk for investors, so the only plan usually revolves around our ability to raise capital till we are profitable (and therefore no longer capital depletive). So, while there are plans A, B and C for capital raising at all times, for the retail crowdfunding angle, probably best to highlight that IF we raise no additional capital, the worst case around April/May will be liquidation.

    In terms of amounts raised already, the crowd (through the Seedrs nominee) has currently got less than a 5% stake in the company and has always been a mix of engagement, marketing and fundraising as you would expect. In other words, its not the most significant of our fundraising components, and therefore hard for you to conclude much from the £2.5m bar (as the parallel institutional conversations including those with current investors, that has seen us raise millions quietly since even the last crowd round, are far more weighted for our success, not least because they also open doors for chunky Pi1 revenue that also gets us towards monthly profitability).

  1. I have asked Petyo, our Head of Engineering to record the Tech Demo we do for our institutional investors, especially for you guys on our community. We will continue to hire selectively in this space and use a mix of local and nearshore developers on contract to scale up and down per month to control costs - if unclear why, read up on what happens when your CTO walks out chicken-dinner in hand elsewhere. :wink: (PS: am up for a healthy debate on this topic on a live session, assuming you still have questions.)
  1. No unsecured consumer lending. If it helps you buy a house (create an asset), build a business (create an asset) or invest (create an asset), we will be in it. If it just gets you to buy a new tele when you haven’t saved up for it, or worse still go on holiday, then we are out and will only use OpenBanking to help you understand your Net Debt / Net Wealth positions.
  1. Yes, very confident. There’s backup plans in place of course but right now Plan A rules barring anything completely unforeseen.
  1. We need to articulate exactly why we want to undertake a 40k+ pages application with significant capital and management mindspace needs, ie what can we not get done with partnerships. Chime’s success in the US is another data point, so yes as of now, not thinking about Banking license for a bit.
  1. Absolutely - per strategy, 2018 was team and licensing, 2019 was launch, 2020 was backend upgrades (and covid as it turned out), and 2021 is back on features. I intend to follow this cycle again.
  1. These are by and large front-end things (KYB instead of KYC is biggest middle office difference for Business accounts), so all for 2021 prioritisation, and all doable if we raise the targeted amounts from institutional investors. If we do Business accounts, they will have access to as many Savings and Investment products as possible as well.
  1. Have just put a long answer out on Seedrs. @robert please will you help copy paste it here.
  1. We make money when you spend, save or invest with us through Interchange, Custody Fees, Platform Fees and FX margins. A little on top if the investment product is also manufactured by us. So target is much higher than the $4.11, hence unsure of your question. Hypothetically, if you spend £1k pm on our card and keep half an ISA with us in some product, we make £12k x 20bp + £10k x 50bp = £74 pa, hence our subscription product will likely be £5 pm with all FX, investing etc free (except strategy costs charged by third-parties like BlackRock, JPM etc). A subscription product with Insurance included will be higher, currently targeting £10-12pm (we like the number 12 :slight_smile: ) but subject to partnerships.
  1. Yes.
  1. Same as Q7 - incremental costs will be minimal and mostly front-end. We have thought about this layered strategy for a long time, so it won’t be a knee jerk reaction for sure. The taxation laws in the UK mean many ‘companies’ are sitting on individual contractors’ liquidity for example - so you can imagine how well the shelf will move over to that segment.
  1. @robert also in Seedrs answer - please paste and refer @Peter and others to it below.
  1. Now that you have said it, it’s got to be the swish one eh. :smiley:
  1. See Q9

Warm regards, hands and fingers,
AC

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Hi @gt94sss2, thanks for your questions.

  1. Likely first week of Dec, so we can show you migration is completed and well thought through. Also, chances of some institutional news coming through before end of year, so keeping an eye out for that to decide dates.
  1. We did apply but suspect still too early stage to get through. Interestingly, one of the winners loves our submission and we maybe able to launch something in partnership with them (can’t share more of course).
  1. No, not secured but process underway. Per 1 above, there is a chance it’s not secured before the round closes, so your investment decision must assume the incremental equity risk.
  1. The May 2021 is in the absence of additional institutional funding, while the 2022 date is a conservative one when including that (as it assumes little or no revenue from Pi1, which will further lengthen the runway).

Yes, Pi1 is a tech and data stack with Design and Brand servicing, as well as Visa cards. So we can issue credit cards globally with Visa’s help but using our clients’ licensing.

  1. @robert think Sam has this - see if we can source?
  1. Yes, @robert and I will work something out for the community for sure.
  1. Not sure yet - it’s merch, so shouldn’t swing your investment decision too much. Am not big on these but ok with them as thank you’s for larger amounts, hence we will get to it when things slightly calmer.
  1. Very likely, £250k out of the £1m bumper January issuance will be reserved for investors. This will be made clearer through the appropriate channels once all cleared through Compliance etc.
  1. Is that a question for Bunq? :slight_smile:

Happy to answer in both places - following first come first served for my time, so Rob and Palina will help copy-paste answers as necessary from the other forums.

Best,
AC

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As per @AC’s comment above, here is an answer provided on the Seedrs board - shared in full for your information about Pi1:

Our (Pi1) key differentiators are:

  1. We offer everything from Cards to Branding to Front-end to Back-end to Data & Analytics, straight out of the box and/or customised. For e.g. if you launch a Visa card on Marqeta processing with Pi1, you get Google Places and all other Dozens innovations like IFTTT integration etc, as well as the Snowflake Data Lake out of the box. This is what we refer to as a one-stop shop.

  2. Pi1 is not a monolith that happens to be built on cloud-native microservices. The stack is genuinely designed as modular, whether thats allowing our clients to pick only one of the above services, or even within a backend service, pick a vendor that they would like to work with. Apart from core banking, cross-asset orchestra, product and balance ledgers, investment guidance and reporting etc that form part of our core offering, almost every service can be customised both for workflows and for partnerships so that we can let the likes of Onfido stay focused on what do they best (and now with ample funding), while building an ecosystem and context around them that makes their product link to broader consumer experiences. Think of it as every Onfido customer will need to build the rest of the experience, so why not - somewhat like iTunes/Apple/Google Play stores for app manufacturers - provide that standardised environment alongwith key OS core modules, rather than compete with every gaming app ourselves. When we are big, the adapters can be built by the fintechs themselves - making it even more like the iTunes analogy.

  3. Through Dozens, Pi1 is LIVE in both payments and investments - this means we encounter financial crime, fraud, and other go-live use cases that being in a sandbox doesn’t quite do. As Dozens is the first tenant in a multi-tenant architecture, every Dozens solution gets added as a feature into Pi1 that our clients can learn from / enjoy without having to go through the launch experience themselves.

  4. Looking ahead, we will invest heavily into the low/no-code space - just like our Snowflake+Looker combo on the Data side, this will significantly reduce costs for our banking clients. So using Pi1, just like they need BI Analysts rather than more expensive Data Architects/Engineers to build more dashboards fit for their purpose, in the future (hopefully 2021) they will be able to launch new credit cards using tech-savvy Product Managers rather than Engineers.

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I looked into this as this was not our event but a Seedrs event. Their event was intended for authorised investors only and therefore restricted to logged-in users of their site.

I will share some relevant information with you privately about this, but I’m unable to share it publicly at the moment, but will see what I can do.

In any case, to answer your other question:

yes, we will hold another live event which will be our own one and just about Project Imagine / Dozens and therefore will be public.

We are awaiting some information on timing relating to the process and will then make tickets available here to community members too.

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Whilst I appreciate the great exchange of rigorous questions and honest answers, not sure I completely agree with the complete removal of the yellow tint of the brand and rather like the yellow d, which is consistent with the current investor card. I think I recall @AC was always a proponent of the black look, championing it for the last investor card, so perhaps he has won this time. :grinning:

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It is, you’ve rumbled me :slight_smile:

Am just surprised their userbase is so low.

Being cheeky, but any chance of a discount for shareholders, call it a perk :slight_smile:

Given the migration to Visa, does Pi1 retain the ability to issue MasterCard’s if that is what the customer wants?

Hahaha, astute, very astute @mimote.

Mangoes are my favourite too - just wasn’t a big one for the lemony one (was the pre-launch debate of vogue here, not sure if you were here then?).

Am just an All or Nothing kind of guy - the Mango card is unashamedly mango, and the Black needs to be the same. There’s a fun side to the proposition, and increasingly a serious one especially when it comes to topics like Retirement Planning - we need to own both… :slight_smile:

PS: Once we have 100k of these in circulation,
we can afford a black card with a mango core. :sunglasses:

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Indeed, we are using qualitative measures like previous round shareholders (from within the customer base), as well as engagement with the Dozens platform etc to preselect some Dozens Black pilot customers for whom the proposition will be free for CY 2021. So get in there and start spending, saving and investing!

MCs… the platform is scheme agnostic so no issues if you have your own cards you want to put on it, but if you dont have your own cards license etc and want to leverage ours, it will have to be Visa.

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This sounds so awesome, and a good monetisation strategy. I’ll be a lot more likely to put more into invest once this is implemented.

And I’ve just gone as full Dozens as I can until you have DD and standing orders so fingers crossed for trying that out!

Thanks for sharing that with us, and your detailed answers, I’m very much looking forward to the future of Dozens.

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OK, another drop in the ocean added. I really liked the idea of the 5k perk but unfortunately couldn’t justify the commitment on this occasion, a shame it isn’t based on total investment! Looking forward to the months ahead, fair wind and following seas.

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@Peter how long a list will I have this weekend? :))

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It’s been a busy week at work…

But as I’ve not yet been distracted by Visa card testing, I think I’ll have some time to properly digest your helpful replies and will almost certainly have some more!