South African stock exchange personal assistant platform Stock Shop is to go live this month, providing education tools, collated products and services, and trading tools for individuals looking to invest on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).
The platform is designed to act as a personal assistant for non-expert individuals looking to invest in stocks, providing access to news, research, events, webinars, Google+ Hangouts, books, study material and podcasts, while connecting them to providers such as brokers and tools such as trading software and analytics.
“The Stock Shop facilitates the interaction between the everyday man or woman and the product and service providers,” founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Annabel Dallamore told HumanIPO.
“In a nutshell the Stock Shop platform and all of its additions act as the personal assistant to anyone looking to learn more about the stock market or start investing their money in a responsible way. The Stock Shop team do the legwork for the everyday man and women so they can save time and money and start being proactive about their finances.”
Dallamore and co-founder Lawrence Joffe began working on the platform in January, having been selected to take part in the Seed Engine accelerator programme in Johannesburg, and have been bootstrapping the business by running networking, education and branding events for their product and service providers prior to the beta launch this month.
They are also currently in the process of developing a trading game – Trade Stars – and an online classroom to allow users to take full courses facilitated by industry experts, while also running two blogs.
“The purpose of the game is to encourage continued use of the Stock Shop platform and the products and services available on the platform,” Dallamore said.
“The game simulates a highly simplified version of the stock market and allows users to earn points by completing certain tasks that mirror those taken by current investors and traders. Users receive rewards and incentives once they have reached certain milestones in the form of products and services that may have a premium attached to them but are now free to players of the game. This allows us to incorporate products and services into the game in order to grow utilisation whilst growing investor behaviour and educating users about the market through gamification modules.”
Dallamore said the online classroom will allow facilitators to provide courses online, almost eliminating capital and time wastage and allowing South Africans access to international facilitators and their content.
“The classroom further engages users on the site and is a mechanism to increase the number of returning users,” she said.
Dallamore – who previously worked at Standard Bank and then at the JSE running its Equity Options market – said Stock Shop is the first platform of its kind and had been created due to her experience of receiving a large number of queries as to how the stock market worked, how people could get involved and what products and services should be used, which as a JSE employee she could not answer.
“The Stock Shop speaks to the needs of these people. A platform of this nature not only aids the end-users in finding the right products and services but aims to grow retail participation in the South African and African stock markets, whilst breeding a culture of saving and investing thereby helping product and service providers market their offerings in the correct manner to the correct market,” she said.
“There is a huge lack of awareness around investing and what products and services are available to the everyday man or woman. People find the area of investing opaque, complicated and time-consuming, and the Stock Shop aims to change all of that.”
The company plans to generate revenues by converting lead generation for product and service providers, with the Stock Shop charging a provider if a user requests an account or demonstration for a service after finding it on the platform and taking a portion of monthly trading fees produced by the user thereafter. It is also introducing an annuity income model whereby the Stock Shop takes a fixed portion of the monthly cost of research, publications, events and trading software.
“The business is highly scalable as participation from the retail market is a largely untapped area and institutions such as the JSE realise they need to grow participation in the area but are simply not doing anything about it, or if they are, they are not making their efforts know,” Dallamore said. “The Stock Shop team also has two strategic alliances with companies who work in Nigeria, Kenya and Zambia and would look to iterate a version of the Stock Shop for each of these markets.”
The Stock Shop is aiming to convert around 2.5 per cent of the site’s users into requesting products and services, which equates to around 450 people. Dallamore targets a break-even date of October 2015.
