Capital Markets Insights

Going Public to Retail Investor Trends: Fintech Fridays Podcast

Katipult Co-Founder Brock Murray and VP of Solution Engineering Karan Khiani joined the Fintech Fridays Podcast hosted by NCFA. They discussed a variety of topics such as going public early, evolving the product to meet complex requirements, and recognizing emerging retail investor trends.

In this podcast, the National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada aims at delivering authentic content, focused on new financial technologies and their impact on the future of finance. As an award-winning company that’s been dubbed "Canada's best-kept fintech secret" by the Financial Post, Katipult was invited to tell the story of how it got here.

 

Early Days

After being introduced to the market in 2015, Katipult started acquiring international customers and it only took two years for the company to get a listing on TSX Venture in 2017. Commenting on the company’s unconventional journey Mr. Murray said:

“Our first five customers were all from five different countries doing alternative investment style businesses, whether it was commercial real estate or private lending. But they were in for four different regulatory jurisdictions. And that was something that we had to accommodate our product to. 

So, you know, on day one, we ended up with a highly flexible configurable system. And that actually kind of gave us you know, it paved the way for a lot of the kind of customers we would bring on overtime where we could meet their needs more easily than I think a lot of software products that are very static in nature.”

Meeting Market Expectations

During the first five years of its existence the company and the product have both come a long way. The challenges they faced during this period both pointed to improvements that needed to be made as well as to the team’s ability to find innovative ways to create value for the users. When discussing Katipult’s biggest challenges Mr. Murray said: 

“There's a lot of unique requirements that customers will come in with, and as your customers get bigger or as they use your product more extensively, there's a lot of new requests that also come up. So there's a need for always iterating the product, improving the product. 

Technology trends keep changing. New competitors arise. So there's a lot of product innovation and you need to have a team that can scale the product technically, but also the processes around serving new customers need to be scalable as well.”

Impact of Retail Investors

Although recent regulatory changes are expanding the ways retail investors can get involved in the markets, handling this sector has always been a rather difficult thing. Katipult VP of Solution Engineering Karan Khiani commented on what are the expectations retail investors have and how that’s impacting both Katipult’s product and the market as a whole:

“Investors now have a certain expectation of how seamless that experience needs to be, how quickly they can access a platform and in three clicks be able to go from intent to decision and investment. Just to give you an example, there is always this trend of where where B2C goes, B2B eventually follows. Right. So the closest example I can think of is individuals that you and I, as consumers, we give up using checks a lot before businesses give up using checks. So business tends to follow. 

And the experience aspect of it that Brock mentioned is really going to be what drives and pushes these businesses to make these digital transformation decisions. So investors that do not get an app or do not get a digital experience through which they can interact with you will essentially not use your phone or not use your services. That's the point that we're getting to.”

Full Podcast Below

These are only some of the highlights of the podcast. For more on these and other topics follow the link to NCFA’s website and listen to the full recording there.