«Our main competitor? People who don’t invest and who keep money in their checking account. In Europe the second asset class after real estate it is cash, money deposited in current accounts ». A phenomenon that becomes an opportunity in the words of Eric Podzuweit, co-CEO and co-founder of Scalable Capital, a German fintech reality that proposes itself as an investment platform within everyone’s reach with a proposal halfway between the wealth management and the trading with the ambition to become “the digital Charles Schwab of Europe”.
The idea was born between Podzuweit and two other colleagues who had worked in Goldman Sachs’ investment banking between London and Frankfurt. “Everyone, friends and relatives, asked us where to invest their savings. We did not have a precise answer: doing nothing was not a good idea, but neither was going to the bank, to the traditional consultant, usually a very expensive and inflexible option. So we understood that the answer could come from technology: a system that could manage money, ”Podzuweit emphasizes.
Thus in 2014 Scalable Capital was born, a reality supervised by the German Bafin which today has over 350 thousand customers with six billion euros of asset under management which is preparing to land shortly in Italy, France and Spain. Among the lenders of the first hour there is also Blackrock, the largest asset manager globally, which is still the largest investor today and collaborates with the platform, especially for portfolios linked to sustainability.
The latest round was last June when Scalable raised € 260 million at a valuation of € 1.5 billion.
The platform’s offer revolves around two models. On the one hand a roboadvisor which automatically manages investments based on the profile of the individual: age, income, risk propensity are sufficient to build a portfolio which can also be adhered to on the basis of monthly savings plans, “with a entry level of a thousand euros, much lower than the classic traditional product, and one fee of management contained at 0.75% per annum ”, underlines the CEO.