For bears and bulls alike, an Uber for investment strategies

Charging Bull, which is sometimes referred to as the Wall Street Bull. Photo credit: Sam Valadi.

Laurence Fauchon, a French national in Hong Kong, is juggling two startups – and they’re very different. Really, very, very different. At the startup she set up last year, she’s fighting back against the dodgy employment agencies that take huge fees from the foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong who do things like nannying and housekeeping.

At her newer startup, where she’s co-founder and COO, Laurence is looking to help investment bankers.

Yeah, investment bankers.

They’re far from being exploited individuals that need help; but the new startup, SmartAlpha, which launched last month, is trying to do something that Laurence and the team believe no tech company has done before – cater to institutional investors rather than targeting small investors cobbling together a portfolio to save for the future like you or I might be doing.

“SmartAlpha is aimed at professional investors, mainly big institutional investors like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and asset managers, because there haven’t been any dedicated data providers servicing these investors,” says Laurence.

The SmartAlpha team at home in Hong Kong. From left to right: SmartAlpha co-founder and COO Laurence Fauchon, marketing and social media Stefanie Detz, quantitative analyst Damien Passemier, and CTO Guillaume Illien. Photo credit: SmartAlpha.

It’s essentially an Uber for certain kinds of investment strategies, connecting major “strategy providers,” as she calls them, to those institutional investors. The startup will make money from a subscription fee for investors, but the service is currently free. (Updated one hour after publishing: The original article mistakenly said the company would take a cut. That’s now corrected.)

Providers already signed up to the marketplace include BNP Paribas and Commerzbank. There are now 400 indices to choose from across all the providers.

Laurence, who holds a MSc in mathematics applied to finance, worked nine years at BNP Paribas, both in Paris and Hong Kong.

The team’s experience in the world of finance – CEO and fellow co-founder Cyprien Sapède has a decade of experience at a major strategy consulting firm in Paris – is a big advantage, admits Laurence. “Building a platform from scratch without these networks already in place would not have been possible.”

Down as well as up

While the way it operates is pretty simple, the products on offer are really complex as SmartAlpha specializes in two specific kinds of investment indices – smart beta and risk premia.

Fintech boom