Although Moniflo has not been launched yet it has already generated a lot of interest. Georges Bock, CEO and founder shares the motivations and vision behind the ESG and impact investment platform.
After spending 27 years in various leading positions at KPMG, most people would have been more than happy to ride it out until retirement. Not Georges Bock, however. The former KPMG managing partner and head of tax decided to take on a new challenge by going to MIT’s Business School to learn more about Blockchain Technologies.
“What drove me was learning more about innovation, digital transformation and DLT. I wanted to do something that’s future-oriented, that would make people’s lives easier and improve our financial system,” says Georges Bock.
After completing his studies at MIT, Georges decided to found Investre in 2020 with the idea of “reinventing how people invest”. The platform, which specialises in ESG and impact investing, does not only want to help people invest in companies whose values they align with, but it also wants to change the investing ecosystem.
“I felt that investing was too exclusive and too expensive. If you really want to have a positive impact you have to make investing more affordable, easier to understand and more accessible to people,” explains Georges.
“In my opinion, asset management has to move away from focussing purely on products and improve the customer experience.”
Georges Bock, Founder and CEO of Investre
A Shift Towards Experience
Georges sees Moniflo, the mobile application built by Investre, as paving the way for the changes that the asset management industry has to undergo anyway.
“In my opinion, asset management has to move away from focussing purely on products and improve the customer experience. The industry is still stuck in the old travel agency mode which required an intermediary to advise you on holiday destinations. Nowadays everyone books their own holidays. Moniflo wants to bring the same mentality to the financial services industry,” explains Georges.
Changing an industry is no small feat but Georges and his team have a plan. By building their platform on the principles of disintermediation by design, Moniflo is going for an “Amazon-like look and feel,” where the intermediary has been cut out and the user experience is front and centre.
Up until now, most retail investors have been excluded from investment funds because of financial and administrational hurdles. By building its platform on DLT and adding educational material to it, Moniflo is helping retail investors overcome these hurdles.
Launching Soon
What does this mean for asset managers? By providing detailed descriptions of asset managers’ ESG and impact funds and making them as easy as possible to access, Moniflo aims to “show [their] funds in a new light”.
Moniflo’s users will be able to use customised search filters and understand the exact impacts of their investments, thereby enabling them to make more informed decisions, because, as Georges puts it: “sustainability is a very personal thing”.
With a European launch planned for the end of September 2022 and real investment activities scheduled for Q4, there still remains some work to be done. Nevertheless, Georges Bock is optimistic about the future of Moniflo. “Within a year of our launch, we hope to have 100K clients. But I would define success on a societal basis. Because as Henry Ford said, ‘if you do a service to society, you shouldn’t have to worry about your profits’. So our first goal for us is to make an impact and give people more access to ESG investing opportunities.”
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Read the full digital version of the magazine on our website, here. You can also choose to receive a hard copy at the office or at home. Subscribe now.
