Interview with Simon Boulet of financial aggregation platform Wealthica
- By Phil Siarri , Nuadox - (Sponsored Content)
Montreal-based startup Wealthica offers a financial aggregation platform where you can see all your investments in one place. Since November, I have been promoting the platform as Brand Ambassador and recently sat down with CEO Simon Boulet to interview him on behalf of Nuadox.
Hi Simon, nice to connect with you as always. Can you tell Nuadox’ readership a little bit about your professional background?
Thanks Phil! I started my career as a Linux Systems Administrator at iWeb, Canada’s largest web hosting provider at the time. I always had a strong sense of entrepreneurship. I left iWeb in 2006 and founded Netsimplify, a server management company. Later in 2009 I returned to iWeb as IT Director after they acquired Netsimplify, only to leave again in 2011 to work on various different startup ideas. iWeb is where my career started and where I met my partners in Wealthica, Eric and Martin.
Image: Wealthica co-founders (from left to right): Eric Chouinard, Simon Boulet and Martin Leclair. Provided by Wealthica.
How did Wealthica come to be? What motivated you to develop such product offering?
In 2015, I was meeting with Eric and Martin and we realized the three of us had investments spread across ten different financial institutions. We had a hard time tracking our investments, and no options existed for Canadians. There was Mint, which did a good job at tracking expenses, but it was really poor at tracking investments.
We started looking for technology partners or data aggregators that could provide us the connection with the financial institutions. Quickly we realized the existing aggregators had terrible support for Canadian investments platforms. So we set out to build our own data aggregation engine for connecting to the Canadian financial institutions and our own dashboard that became Wealthica.
Motion graphic: Video capture of the Wealthica platform.
Recently the platform surpassed 1 billion dollars of aggregated assets. Was that a milestone your team set from the get go?
We started 2017 with $300M in total aggregated assets and our goal was to reach $1B before the end of the year. We reached $1B in November and are now well on track to reach $3B this year.
You also acquired Stockchase, an established online community that compiles expert comments on stocks. What was the reasoning behind that acquisition?
I started investing in 2009 after iWeb had acquired Netsimplify and after the financial crisis. I remember stumbling on Stockchase while looking for new companies to invest in. Since then Stockchase has been my go-to reference whether I’m looking for new stocks to buy or wondering if I should continue to hold or sell an under-performing one.
I initially reached out to the Stockchase owners to integrate Stockchase experts opinions into Wealthica. After a few discussions the partnership idea shifted into an acquisition opportunity. The site was in need for a good refresh in term of design and features, something our team was really accustomed to do. The opportunity would also allow us to present Wealthica to thousands of visitors visiting Stockchase every day.
Stockchase has been a good growth engine for Wealthica. And we recently released the Stockchase Widget in Wealthica, which allow our users to instantly view experts opinions tailored to their investment portfolio.
Canada lacks open banking legislation such as PSD2 in the European Union. Do you anticipate such could be adopted in the near future? If so, how would this affect Wealthica’s operations and potential reach?
I’m convinced Canada will have to go through some regulations to force financial institutions to open up and allow Canadians to access their financial data securely through 3rd party apps. Similar to what is happening in Europe with PSD2.
Customers are in a situation where they are forced to share their banking credentials to allow apps like Mint, Quickbooks Online or Wealthica to access their data. This is unacceptable. Having to ask our users for their credentials to retrieve their data is far from being ideal and is definitively the biggest challenge we have when onboarding new users into our platform.
Thankfully some institutions are opening up and offering secure APIs. Wealthica uses secure read-only APIs when connecting to Questrade, Interactive Brokers, and recently robo-advisor WealthBar. Customers have to start asking their financial institutions access to their data, and start moving to more open platforms.
Last but not least, what’s next for the company in 2018?
This year is all about monetization. I think we’ve been late at testing our monetization strategy and this was definitively a mistake. Our dashboard is free to use for individual investors and will remain free, but we are working on adding paid advanced add-ons and reports into the platform. The initial add-ons store is set to launch by the end of March.
We also just announced support for Qtrade, HSBC InvestDirect and Credential Asset Management, bringing the total number of supported institutions in Wealthica to 42. We’re planning to add new financial institution every month and reach 50 by the end of 2018.
Wealthica has financially contributed towards this post. We are including this notice in an effort to remain transparent towards our readership.
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