Interview: Scott Cooper, CybiWealth – investing big for small pockets
Investing big for small pockets
In an exclusive interview with Scott Cooper, CEO of CybiWealth, we discover about clever investment management, frustrations, and how they take care of choices.
On a Tuesday evening in a mid-tier London restaurant, I found myself overhearing three twenty-something girls discuss how optimised their current investment portfolio was. “It just takes too much time to keep it up-to-date,” complained one of them.
CybiWealth is one of those tools making these conversations possible – a single, managed portfolio from which users can access stocks from multinational companies and worry little about the daunting process around investing.
The firm’s CEO, Scott Cooper, realised there were many shortcomings within the investment management industry: “CybiWealth was born out of my own frustrations with the investing world. When I was starting to invest I struggled to wade through the many investment options and understand what I should be investing in.”
CybiWealth is based in the Isle of Man, and has picked strategic partners along the way to create a carefully crafted architecture to make investment a no brainer for the user. The firm uses Saxo Bank’s white-labelled platform to secure the buying and selling of shares, and Worldpay as a payment processor to facilitate the consumer’s transfers from their accounts.
No headaches
Through CybiWealth, investors can access firms like Coca-Cola, Colgate, Nestlé and Johnson & Johnson. There is no need for the individual investors to worry about choosing the shares themselves. The portfolio is carefully managed by FIM Capital’s experienced investment team and contains companies that have a history of providing reliable and growing dividends for their investors.
Cooper tells us that CybiWealth selects approximately 20 of these companies and maintains a buy-and-hold strategy where possible. This strategy differs from exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and collective investment schemes, which tend to have many more companies in their portfolios and a high turnover of investments.
Instead of owning a fraction of a unit trust or mutual fund, CybiWealth’s share portfolio allows users to directly own shares, which usually means paying less tax on dividends received.
Simple and accessible
It all starts with app accessibility. “This includes electronic identity verification upon sign-up, a low minimum investment of just £500 and the ability to invest via bank transfer, credit or debit card through our app,” Cooper tells us.
A new client needs to find it easy to log into the app and sign up to the service, and it needs to remove the barriers to investing. The app doesn’t require any upfront investment fees and has a low annual fee of just 0.825% compared to an average of 2.56% for UK retail investors.
Through the app, investors receive market commentary, notification of dividends, notification of share purchases and sales, and news on their companies in which they have invested – all on their mobile device.
“This continual feedback loop helps our investors to understand what is going on in their portfolio and shifts investing from a scary, grudge purchase towards something that is simple to understand and, perhaps, even enjoyable,” concludes Cooper.
This article is also featured in the FinovateEurope 2019 Supplement.
Click here to read the digital edition, it is free! Or pick up a complimentary print copy at the conference (12-15 February 2019, Tobacco Dock London).
