I started Evarvest in Australia in January 2018 as an investing education blog with a goal to promote financial literacy and wise investment decisions. I think that lack of financial education is one of the biggest issues we face in today’s world.
Often when you’re trying to educate yourself a lot of easily accessible information and financial resources assume a certain level of familiarity, which makes them difficult to understand for the beginners. The goal of our investing education blog was to make it easy and relatable for people to understand investing and help them get started, while scaling their level of knowledge over time. This approach turned out to be popular — as we have grown to more than 100k views from new investors (the ideal Evarvest users) from over sixty countries.
After the success of our blog we decided to create a solution that unites global stock exchanges in one single app and makes them accessible to investors from all over the world. This also stemmed from a problem I faced personally — it’s both difficult and costly to access domestic and international markets. In Australia, my bank used to charge me $25 in brokerage fees per transaction, with a minimum transaction value of $500 to access our local stock exchanges. While many banks have since reduced their fees in Australia and other parts of the world they're still relatively expensive, especially for those who want to buy stocks in smaller transactions. By comparison, to access international markets, in some countries, you typically require a minimum $10,000 - $20,000 to open an account.
The combination of poor resources for novice investors coupled with the barrier to entry to global markets prompted us to start building a service to trade stocks, rather than just help people learn about them.
We decided to move our headquarters from Sydney, Australia, to Vilnius, Lithuania, in order to enter the European market. We researched the regulations globally for the license we needed and found the EU to be the best choice, as the EU's regulations allow us to obtain one license and then use the ‘passporting regime’ to expand into further European countries without obtaining a license in each individual EU member state. This gives us the ability to reach more users in more markets that are underserved and only have traditional, complex and expensive ways to access domestic and international stock markets.
We applied for our Lithuanian license in December 2019 and we expect it to be approved this year. Simultaneously, as a part of our ‘Brexit’ strategy we have also moved forward with our UK license which we anticipate to be approved by the end of May 2020.
Life in Lithuania
I used to live in Sydney, and while Vilnius is a smaller city, it really is a nice place to live. Compared to Australia it's colder — although I'm unusual in that I love the cold and the snow. We've been living in Lithuania for nearly 2 years and we find it a really welcoming country.
In terms of language, most people here speak English, though we've been trying to learn Lithuanian which is a bit more challenging to pick up than I expected. Mornings in the city are quite peaceful and it often gets livelier in the day. There's also a lot of government-organised initiatives helping to develop the community spirit here, and at the end of each summer there are lots of events like music festivals and other recreational activities. Also we learnt that Lithuanian people are quite similar to Australians and in many ways we share the same sense of humour.
The Product
We're building a stock trading app directed to the new generation of investors — think of it like the Spotify of global stock trading, where we unite many stock exchanges into one single app and remove barriers to entry such as difficult sign-up procedures or high fees. Once we launch, we’ll offer our users commission-free and/or low-cost access to over 30 stock exchanges all over the world.
- We're commission-free in the US, and have no minimum transaction amount, which means that when you're buying a share for $1, you’ll pay precisely this amount. Using our app, you can track news and updates on your portfolio and other stocks you might be interested in. Additionally, you’ll have access to our educational library from within the app.
- Social Investing is another interesting feature we will have within our app that enables you to follow the portfolio of your friends or top performing investors. At Evarvest we believe in making investing social, empowering young investors to learn from others, educated themselves and in turn make wise financial decisions, helping them to secure their financial future.
- Fractional Investing is one of the upcoming features that I’m very excited about, which aligns with our goal of removing barriers to entry. Fractional investing will allow our users to buy partial shares in their favourite companies, meaning if you wanted to buy a more expensive share, such as Amazon, you could by $10 or $100 worth instead of the full share, giving you a smaller entry price.
As for the future, we have a couple of other offerings we want to expand into, primarily focused on retirement savings, as traditional pension funds underperform and are often misaligned with the investment choices/goals of the next generation of investors.
The Immigration Process
After applying for the Lithuanian Startup Visa programme run by Startup Lithuania, we had our first interview with them in April 2018, moved to Lithuania in July 2018 and officially received the startup visa in September 2018. The application process is as follows:
- You fill out an online application describing your company and send through supporting information which is reviewed by a committee comprised of relevant experts
- If they think your company is a good fit, you move onto a recorded video interview where you pitch your company. The committee makes their final decision based on your companies eligibility to be considered a startup (growth potential, impact in Lithuania), as well as your background
- If you're accepted, the next step is to liaise remotely with various organizations to help you get set up in the country, like immigration and real estate.
Fundraising
In July 2019 we closed our first crowdfunding round reaching 304% of our initial target. We had individual investors from Lithuania as well as people from Europe, Australia and beyond. The local startup ecosystem has been a great help to us overall. We found crowdfunding the right fit for us, since we’re aiming to expand internationally, having shareholders distributed internationally helps us to better understand market dynamics in more countries. At this point we are focused on finalising our UK and EU license procedures as well as growing our community and user base.
Words of Advice
My advice for other entrepreneurs would be first to understand what their goal and vision for the company is and to make all decisions on the basis of where you want to end up. For immigrant founders specifically, I think the key thing is to figure out which country makes the most sense for your company based on geographic location, size, and specific legal and cultural considerations, as well as a strong startup scene maximising the ability to successfully build and launch a new company.
