The world of finance is changing, and Kerim Derhalli wants to make it available to everyone. An industry veteran with over 20 years experience, he says that the financial sector is yet to go through its social revolution -- but it's coming.
Derhalli believes that people should be making their own investment decisions and he's been hard at work on an app to make financial information more open.
Normally the reserve of antiquated, expensive subscription services, this is the live market data, research reports used by those on the inside to make investment decisions.
His career has taken him from director at JP Morgan and the Bankers Trust to managing director at Merrill Lynch and most recently Deutsche Bank, which he left in October 2012 to found Invstr.
Headquartered in London and with a development office in Istanbul, Invstr employs 20 people and a number of consultants.
The Invstr app launched on Android, Blackberry, iOS and Kindle Fire in December 2014 and has since been downloaded nearly 50,000 times.
His work developing the app came from a realisation that financial markets should no longer feel closed to the general public. As well as providing financial information the app is also designed to help people understand how markets work. A series of games lets users make predictions and follow market data to better understand trends. "The financial world is changing," Derhalli tells WIRED.co.uk. "Money matters to all of us and yet the financial industry has yet to experience the social revolution that has fundamentally transformed other aspects of our lives."
The UK is its second largest market after the US and Derhalli believes its success is being driven by people's desire to have more control over their money. The global financial crisis also made people more suspicious of allowing others to manage their finances, he claims.
"We have all become better informed. We like to share our experiences and learn from others. We like to feel empowered to make informed decisions for ourselves. These experiences have taught us to be more independent and social at the same time."
The app aims to do three things -- provide high-quality information, create a like-minded community and make people money. Derhalli says Invstr provides information that was previously only available to users of expensive subscription services. This high-value information, locked away for the use of financial experts, is rarely seen by the outside world.
Taking this information and putting it into a slick, well-designed app makes it accessible to anyone with a smartphone.
Admittedly, Invstr still presents a confusing array of technical terms and jargon, but the amount of information available is staggering.
Live market data from 70,000 stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities is combined with news from financial news outlets such as Barrons, Dow Jones and The Financial Times. Research reports costing between 80p and £3.99 are also available on-demand. A crowdsourced predictive marketplace also helps investors gauge the state of the market in real time. There's also encrypted chat where users can talk in private.
The app is free to download and makes its money through a "pay as you go" model. As well as selling research reports, there's also a 4p charge for market commentaries, with real-time data on stocks and bonds charged at less than 1p per security, per day.
Derhalli, a Kuwait-born Oxford graduate, previously made headlines in 2003 when he sued Lehman Brothers for constructive dismissal and breach of contract in a £10m lawsuit that made it to London's high court. The case was eventually settled out of court for a reported £5m, but not before the excesses and insider secrets of the financial sector were hauled into the spotlight. "I lived in Tokyo, Singapore, New York and London and travelled everywhere else in between. I was lucky enough to meet a lot of very smart people with very diverse backgrounds.
What I enjoyed most was interacting with clients and colleagues and learning new skills in the many roles I performed."
Derhalli believes that a social, mobile platform for financial markets can make them as accessible as other social networks. He says it's high-time that someone demystified financial markets.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
