Q&A: Al Bentley, Simply Wall St
I am pleased to present Founder Down Under’s first startup interview. Al Bentley is the CEO and co-founder of Simply Wall St, a Sydney-based company that aggregates company financials and analyst forecasts into concise infographics for retail investors. The company is a graduate of the AWI Ventures accelerator, has previously raised A$600K in angel investment, and is currently raising its A$2M Series A round.
Hello Al, and welcome to the site!
Please tell us about Simply Wall St. How did you and your co-founders come to start the company?
I taught myself to invest using the Motley Fool and various other sources back in 2010 and quickly realised it was a horrific experience. All the websites have ulterior motives, brokers just want you to trade more or take a fee for ‘managing’ your money.
As a programmer I started experimenting with solutions to the problem in 2013 as side project. In 2014 I left Oil & Gas to start Simply Wall St as part of the AWI fintech accelerator program in Sydney.
What does the company look like today?
7 staff, 110,000 monthly active users, live in US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand!
What drove the decision to focus on retail investors? Do you have any plans to revisit the institutional market?
We see the retail side of the market as being underserved and often getting abused by the institutions or financial services in general. For example financial advisers are often compensated with commission when they put their clients into different products, or brokers who’s businesses are based on transactions encourage clients to transaction but don’t really care about their returns.
Our product solves a problem for the retail investor, which is a very different problem to an institutional investor.
Can you tell us about some of the growth opportunities you see? (e.g. applying the site’s current functionality to new use cases, new functionality, new target customers)
We see big potential for growth in serving underserved markets. For example if you are investor in the US you are probably one of the luckiest people in the world. You have cheap (or free) brokerage, heaps of information sources available for free and very active social networks. When you leave the US you find that in many places the situation is a decade behind, for example in Australia up until recently it cost $60 to buy an international stock.
What resources would you recommend to readers for learning about Australian fintech?
I would recommend not focusing on fintech as such, and just reading up on tech/startups/growth in general. All the same stuff applies and I think often where fintechs get stuck is because they think of themselves differently. There are heaps of good articles on Medium, and Paul Grahams essays are a good place to start.
Thanks for your time, Al!
I’m an Australian MBA student, currently on exchange at HEC Paris, aiming to work in VC. Let me know if you’re recruiting, or if you know someone who is!
Email: founderdownunder@gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petersahui
