GetEquity: The Future of Decentralized Fundraising and Trading

The future of investment will be the ability to digitize any asset in the world and make it fungible and transferable across borders.

GetEquity is on the trajectory to make this possible.

For a while now, I have had it in mind to write about some of the products that really interest me. I basically want to look at their potential and the ways I think they can grow.

All of this is all based on my own intuition and I’m sure the product team has better Ideas: after all, they are doing the hard work of execution.

ABOUT GETEQUITY:

GetEquity right now is basically disrupting the digital investment space, basically; they want to take investment to a whole new level when it comes to convenience and efficiency. Just to paint a picture, GetEquity can give anyone the ability to angel invest in any start-up or business of their choice and with the product, investors can manage their investments.

Right now, GetEquity has not launched so a lot has not been said about its use cases, I intend to actually go into the different use cases for GetEquity and discuss its potential in the crowdfunding space and its ability to scale and serve markets way beyond even African companies.

TRADITIONAL FUNDRAISING:

The term” traditional” does not always have to mean obsolete and inefficient, for me it means a system that is familiar, effective and can be made better.

The way investment work today is definitely a system that needs a total overhaul and revamp and what has made the system live this long is that traditional systems have been put in place to sustain the gaps in the system. One of the biggest gaps in traditional forms of investment has to be the unequal access to information and restriction to access.

Right now, some of the best startups in their early stages are not known to the public, also these startups are not accessible to just any investor.

Right now, there is a need to provide information and access and build on these 2 gaps to create extensions that will overhaul the traditional investment systems. We need a product like GetEquity that informs us on the investment and also gets us access, on top of this transferability and other issues would be easy to engage and address.

THE POTENTIAL FOR GETEQUITY :

GetEquity is not the first product to offer digital investments, a whole lot of other products exist that focus on different niches in the crowdfunding space and a lot more companies are building verticals to offer similar services for various kinds of digital investments.

Some examples of these products are:

1. WeFundr: Based in San Francisco, United States. It helps startups raise funding via crowdfunding. Most of the investors targeted are angel investors seeking new interesting deals. WeFundr does not however offer the flexible transfer of assets and is limited to only startup investment.
2. KickStarter: This product is a crowdfunding donation platform that connects donors with creatives. In this case, donors are able to fund creatives. This product promises no returns and is mostly only targeted at all kinds of creative projects which aren’t always non-profit.
3. Fundrise: This product gives democratized access to real estate investment. They offer fractional real estate investment packages starting from $1000.
4. PopRev: This product is a partnership between 2 Nigerian products: PiggyVest and UduX. This product would help fans of different music artists invest in their favorite artists and track their investments.

Based on what exists in the market, it is clear that GetEquity exists in an untapped market and it’s potential can be tapped in the following areas:

GLOBAL EXPANSION:

We know GetEquity is a Nigerian product but then this product has the potential to be a global product especially in emerging markets. In emerging markets like India, UAE, etc. Several countries are actually very sane environments with government regulations seeking to accommodate any innovation that would fill the investment gaps. Another remarkable thing about these places is that they have friendly regulatory frameworks for SME financing and partnerships, they are also receptive towards global competition and global players. Apart from emerging markets, more developed countries like Estonia, Ireland and the Netherlands are becoming increasingly open to more startups from around the world, and they would be more open to a product like GetEquity that reduces the investor-investment gap.

A NEW MODEL OF ASSET TRADING:

In today’s world asset trading has become a sport for so many people, making it a hubby for risk-takers. Also other than the hunger for trade, nowadays people want to own a portion of the value and they want to be able to transfer that value for a premium (gain).

GetEquity has the potential to open a global trading platform for fractional ownership of digital assets across emerging markets. This model also gives GetEquity large leverage on access to revenue via deal flows and access to data on people’s behavioral patterns towards digital investment. Robinhood made over $642,000,000 as deal flow revenue in 2020. This only paints a picture of the potential that seamless and simple trading will have on GetEquity.

USE CASES:

The use cases for GetEquity would be enormous and I believe it would surpass the expectations of the product owners. The success of this notion lies in GetEquity’s ability to drive the adoption and features based on the user’s wants(The team won’t actually disappoint on this part). You’d actually know that GetEquity has been planning to let users do what they want in the way they have spiced the product copy with some ambiguity pertaining to the term investment. There are no specifics which is why GetEquity might actually become a commodities market for agricultural products or fractional investment in futures tied to agriculture. People might invent investment securities and instruments on GetEquity. Off the top of my head, the use cases are enormous but what would make them actually hit the sky is if they are ushered in by users rather than based on a hypothesis.

INFLUENCING REGULATION:

One of the biggest hurdles to innovation has to be regulation especially in a country like Nigeria. The bottlenecks faced due to regulation are not just prevalent in Nigeria but it is also common in even more industrialized economies especially when it is related to finance. According to research by the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research: “The impacts of regulation have been assessed as rather ambivalent for innovation in general”. I strongly believe that GetEquity will fall within the range of companies that are “Too Big To Fail”. It all depends on GetEquity’s ability to grow large enough by being interconnected, interoperable and international. It’s simply a case of GetEquity growing large enough to be trusted and used by large institutional investors and becoming the channel in which value can be invested in. With GetEuity growing big, the only thing possible would be for the government to partner with companies like them and build the regulation rails for cross-border digital investments.

MY ADVICE:

1. Expansion to global emerging and stable markets like Ireland, India, UAE, Estonia, etc.
2. Tokenisation of different assets and the seamless transfer of ownership across borders.
3. Offer government securities in partnerships with governments.
4. Partner ministries and parastatals seeking to promote efforts towards increasing investments.
5. Offer infrastructure for a vast number of similar products to be built on the GetEquity rails.

CONCLUSION:

GetEquity has not launched yet but it is a product that excites me, because it is one of those that breaks barriers and has the power to ensure inclusive investment across traditional and modern channels by digitizing and bringing everything together. I am no expert in the business of investment and one thing is for sure a lot of things said are much easier to spill out than to actually do or implement. Nonetheless, I am bullish on GetEquity and I can’t wait to see them in the global spotlight.