Investfit has been crowned as the winner of FST Media’s Start-up Showcase at our 2016 Future of Insurance conference in Sydney.

Investfit has been crowned as the winner of FST Media’s Start-up Showcase at our 2016 Future of Insurance conference in Sydney.

Chaired by Stone and Chalk board member, Nerida Caesar, the event saw five start-ups from Stone and Chalk take to the stage and pitch their ideas in front of an audience of distinguished guests and senior industry executives across insurance and banking.

The participants highlighted their unique selling points via an interactive on-stage demonstration, with the winner determined by live polling.

Winner: Investfit

Founder: James Claridge, Director of Investfit

The Pitch:

Having first launched in Stone and Chalk last year, Investfit aims to improve peoples’ lives by maximising their financial outcomes and giving them greater confidence in those outcomes. By combining optimisation routines with stochastic projections, the fintech helps users find investment strategies that maximise clients’ financial outcomes given their current financial situation and the level of confidence they need.

According to Investfit’s director, James Claridge, financial advice today is deterministic, with everyday Australians not being provided with the right information and consequently making decisions that were not necessarily the most relevant in terms of their financial goals and outcomes.

“Our view is that some of the tools that have been used to determine peoples’ investment strategies are not as good as they could be,” Claridge said.

“We’re trying to help people understand that while short term variability can be upsetting and distressing depending on your circumstances, [it] might not be as significant when we look at the long term outcomes. Our promise is that we can give [people] the information they need to make the best decisions.”

Claridge identified three key target markets for Investfit’s product offering: people that use financial advisers, do-it-yourself investors – such as self-managed superannuation fund members – and other individuals who choose their own investment strategy, as well as other Australians who are not necessarily financially engaged or do not currently have access to financial advice.

What’s next:

Claridge said that Investfit is currently speaking to a variety of financial planners to help understand how to improve their core offering.

“We already know what we need to improve on to make it easy to use and easy to understand for people who aren’t financially engaged or experts,” Claridge said.

“We’ll [keep] getting a lot of feedback from the financial planning market to help us understand how the tool can improve in terms of engagement, we’ll learn from that and make it more engaging and more approachable for the end user as well.”

Claridge said that Investfit was readying a slew of enhancements set to be introduced in the coming months, including allowing couples to enter joint financial information – instead of registering as individuals – as well as an overhaul of the product’s user interface.