The Money Management Fintech & Platforms and Wraps Fintech Showdown winner was online brokerage company, Macrovue.

The annual Money Management Fintech Platforms & Wraps conference gathered the best and brightest minds in the sector together in New South Wales to discuss the future of wealth management technology. The first full day of the conference saw the annual Fintech Showdown between a selection of the country’s brightest entrepreneurs, and was won by Sydney-based online brokerage start-up, Macrovue.

Starting with the idea of translating complex market information into a simple structure for new investors, chief executive and founder Sid Sahgal and co-founder and head of equity research Dev Sinha designed Macrovue to be an affordable way for retail investors to enter the stock market.

According to Sahgal, the most prolific problem facing innovators and entrepreneurs on their start-up journey were still the complex legal frameworks in Australia and overseas.

“The biggest challenge we faced was understanding and addressing the Australian and international regulations faced by an international share trading platform,” said Sahgal.

“There are high legal barriers to entry for fintechs in the wealth management space and the main challenge for a start-up is finding product-market fit as quickly as possible.”

Sahgal and Sinha, who come from technology and research backgrounds, are now preparing for the launch of a Macrovue website geared to direct retail customers, set to be unveiled in September.

“We will be releasing enterprise versions of our platform for businesses, including advisers and accountants, in Q4 2016,” said Sahgal.

When given the opportunity to reflect on knowledge and advice he wishes he had been privy to before his venture, Sahgal said that defining your product and its placement within the broader fintech industry, as well as mapping out a proposed plan were the keys to successfully developing a competitive player.

“The main challenge for a start-up is finding product-market fit as quickly as possible. It is important to learn from each iteration of building the product,” he said.

“You can only learn if you develop a hypothesis about customer behaviour and run experiments to validate that hypothesis, then change course if needed.”

To keep up to date, visit macrovue.com.au