This Platform Provides The Infrastructure For Opening Up Sophisticated Investing To Regular People

A fair share of fintechs focused on making wealth-building a more equitable proposition target such areas as boosting access to home ownership. David Dindi is taking a different approach. His two-year-old startup Atomic aims to eliminate barriers to sophisticated stock market investing, allowing a critical mass of regular people to reap those benefits. “We want to make wealth building accessible to every human being, eliminating financial circumstance from the equation of success,” he says.

Specifically, Atomic’s platform allows banks, fintechs and others to add investing as a white labeled service for their customers, without the headaches that would usually involve. Thus, it takes care of everything from regulatory compliance and trading to portfolio management, relieving companies from having to spend the time and money to build the required connectivity, operations and everything else. 

“We’ve done the heavy lifting for them,” says Dindi. “They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.” 

More than a dozen companies will be launching the platform over the next several months, according to Dindi.

Customers Serving Millions of People

To attract a broad range of potential investors, the platform has two tracks. For more experienced or confident users, there’s the option to create their own portfolios. Everyone else provides their risk profile, as well as investing preferences, such as avoiding private prisons or favoring companies fighting climate change. Then, the platform constructs a tailored portfolio of more than 100 stocks. In the process, investors also receive a bit of an education about the stock market.

Ultimately, by working with banks and other companies serving millions of consumers, there’s a potential to reach a large number of users. “That’s how we maximize our reach,” says Dindi. Plus the platform allows smaller companies with fewer resources to add the service. 

Dindi sees the platform as part of investing’s gradual evolution. In the first phase, in the 1970’s, companies, like Vanguard and Fidelity, expanded access to investment with the distribution of mutual funds. More recently, digital platforms like Wealthfront or Robinhood let more people invest at a lower cost. The third phase: outsourced platforms allowing appropriate companies to offer investing services, thereby avoiding the hassles and expense of compliance, operational and technical overhead. 

“When you think about democratizing access to building wealth, it’s about providing the infrastructure so that anyone from a small bank to a large fintech let end users engage in investing,” says Dindi.

$25 Million in Funding

Dindi got the idea for the company after numerous people started asking him for investing advice, thanks to his background in tech and finance. It also brought home to Dindi the barriers preventing large numbers of regular people to invest. What was needed, he decided, was a new way to make wealth building through investing more accessible to a larger population. With that in mind, he founded Atomic in 2020.

After that, Dindi built the platform and raised $25 million in funding. Its latest round was a recent Series A from QED Investors and Athemis with participation from SB Opportunity Fund and Y Combinator.

View original article at Forbes.com