It has never been easier for retail investors to use their capital to finance sustainable activities. Gaelle Haag, founder of inclusive investment platform Startalers, explains.
How do Startalers’ activities contribute towards sustainable financial investments?
Indirectly, we’re trying to direct more retail capital into sustainable finance. We’re trying to make sure investments are sustainable in the sense that they have lower environmental footprints when it comes to negative aspects and a positive social footprint. We’re not looking at labels. We’re considering that the customer wants to make sure that she can contribute through her investments, to solving the transition issues we have, towards a more sustainable model environmentally, and a more inclusive and sustainable model socially speaking. And we show what are the investments that allow you to do that while preserving your capital.
Capitana, Startalers’ investment app, was designed to address the obstacles faced by women who want to invest. Tell us more about these obstacles?
The first was the lack of confidence and financial literacy. We built and designed an onboarding process and a pre onboarding, a facility that would allow investors and in particular female investors to get comfortable with starting to invest and also lower the barrier to entrance by allowing them to start with small tickets. The second is the need to have a purpose in your investments. Investing is a means towards an end, but women also care about how they reach their objective and if their investments are aligned with their values. That was something that held them back from investing in different proposals that they might have gotten from traditional banks and advisors.
“A lot of younger, male investors have started with much less.”
Gaëlle Haag, Founder & CEO of Startalers and Capitana app
To what extent have retail investor profiles and market demand changed since Startalers launched in 2018?
We see a pickup in retail investors, in the young generation, also women to some extent. In 2020, people had a lot of time during the lockdown. Evaluations were sexy, so a lot of people also took the opportunity to get into the market. I don’t know if they’re still happy with that choice right now.
Over the past year, we’ve seen an increase in interest for financial education. There are more and more platforms, also focusing on financial education, for women and millennials, all kinds of different verticals. I think that it is a very good thing because you can never do enough to encourage people to take care of their finances and educate themselves.
Startalers launched Capitana in autumn 2021. How would you summarise the first months?
We launched our portfolios in October, and got our first real paying customers in December. We did a kind of beta launch, meaning you had to subscribe to the pre-registration list, from which we selected 100 potential customers based on how ready they were to start investing. Then we onboarded them, one-by-one, to understand the needs and make sure that the platform was responding to them. In March we opened it to everyone and are moving into the fully digital self-service kind of onboarding.
What were the trends you observed with the initial cohort of 100 customers on Capitana?
What surprised me was how specific some of our customers could be. One of our customers, who wanted to invest in water cycles, found out about us through a Google keyword. We had done an article about it because this is one of the themes that you can invest in with Capitana.
Aside from this, what was interesting was that when women tell you they don’t have much money to invest, we don’t have the same perception. When they think that they don’t have enough to start investing, it’s actually more than enough. A lot of younger, male investors have started with much less. And then the average risk profile is also different because you can read a lot about how risk averse women are but that’s not what I observe in observing the customers. This being said, I probably have a biased sample because it’s a new platform and if you have signed up to be one of the first that probably means that you’re ready.
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