A simulator for managing consumer lending portfolios just raised $750k

Photo credit: Olu Eletu.

How do you learn to fly a plane without a few hundred crashes? A good start: get in a flight simulator and crash to your heart’s content. Conversely, how do you learn to manage consumer loans without a few hundred bank account crashes? Well, it turns out there’s a simulator for that too.

Singapore- and San Francisco-based PortfolioQuest just announced it has raised a pre-seed round of US$750,000. The round is led by Nels Friets, vice-chairman and co-founder of Singapore-based fintech supporter Tryb, who also joins the company as director. It’s also led by financial veteran and Tryb investment advisor Venkatesh Sethuraman who, along with Nels, will act as advisor to the company. Singapore-based VC Wavemaker Partners participated, along with a number of private investors from the financial sector.

PortfolioQuest, a project founded in 2015 and incubated at fintech breeding ground BankersLab, is a gamified training tool for managing consumer lending portfolios. Users, or “players,” can practice in virtual scenarios that hone their forecasting, decision-making, and portfolio management skills.

See: Tryb wants to be the thread that ties the Southeast Asian fintech ecosystem together

The tool also includes benchmarking capabilities that measure players’ skills. It includes leaderboards, competitions, and progress metrics that let players know how they’re performing.

The funding will be used to launch a paid beta version of PortfolioQuest aimed at bank management that wants to receive insight about employee skills and training requirements.

“In a ‘post-bot’ world of robo-tools, the strategic and forecasting job functions take on crucial importance,” Michelle Katics, CEO of PortfolioQuest and BankersLab, says in a statement. “These skills require more powerful training tools than static e-learning in order to safely achieve positive financial outcomes.”