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“Stop chasing money, chase wealth,” a line from a viral YouTube video made by Garry Tan, the next president and CEO of Y Combinator. Tan encourages people to find leverage that can make money while sleeping, instead of selling time to earn one-time money. Goodfin, a private community and banking platform, aims to pave the way of wealth pursuit for individual investors, breaking the threshold of private banking.
The private securities market is predicted to grow exponentially in the next decade, with a total value of USD$30 trillion by 2030. To enable wealth management for people other than billionaires or millionaires, Goodfin connects investors and fund managers to break the barriers. With cloud computing and distributed systems, the platform modernizes traditional banking services by integrating with brink and mortar banks and providing a private bank in the cloud for customers.
Imagine yourself as a young lawyer earning USD$200,000 per year. You are interested in private banking but are unqualified to use the services of traditional banks. With GoodFin, you can access a diversified portfolio of tech companies founded by Harward alumni or YC founders. To unlock wealth management for everyone, GoodFin builds its financing services tailored to people with ambitions. Here are the ways they roll it.
Within traditional banks, private banking services only target high-income groups, whose assets are valued at one million dollars or more. Those high thresholds for private banking block out plenty of individuals who want to access the market. GoodFin gets exclusive access to curated investment opportunities, by accumulating collective wealth and knocking on banks’ doors. The platform empowers those who have ambitions and potential but yet reach the standards to engage with private banking.
Co-founders Anna Joo Fee and Johnny Chien are a good fit for the business. With two Harvard degrees in Economics and Juris Doctor, Joo Fee has working experience in Sullivan and Cromwell, an international law firm on Wall Street. As one of the very few female founders in fintech, Joo Fee first launched the GoodFin and had Chien on board as a partner via the Y Combinator matching platform. After graduating in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Chien was a software engineer and technical lead at Amazon and Google. During his time at Amazon, he built the first B2B payment for the e-commerce giant.
With two strengths joining forces, GoodFin becomes the first digital private banking platform built globally. Taking advantage of co-founders’ networks and experiences in the fintech industry, GoodFin collects money from individuals and invests in top private equity funds and startups backed by leading venture capital firms.
As the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When dealing with investments, GoodFin takes diversity into account and diverts the money into different fields. The startup invests early in the potential unicorns with minimum payments as low as USD$5,000 from each member. While traditional banks set the threshold of investment as high as USD$5 million, GoodFin targets people with high-income potential, whose assets might yet qualify for the private banking services of traditional banks.
Wealth in the world now is distributed unequally, as American families in the top 10% held 72% of the country's wealth in 2019, according to Congressional Budget Office. However, GoodFin opens the door to people other than the top 10% and aggregates financial power to make smart money, which helps members yield 350 times of the returns that standard bank accounts offer, according to GoodFin.
Chien learns the ropes by taking attempts by himself, as he started to do real estate investing when he was at Amazon. He and his brother bought houses around the world and turned them into Airbnb rooms. He even wrote a program to analyze the best spots to invest in automatically. In 2021, Chien started a startup called Bidllion, a real-estate investment platform, driving partnerships with real estate brokerage overseas and implementing customer acquisition strategies. Spending years in researching and engaging with fintech, Chien also leads and mentors young professionals in the Taiwanese community, namely the Taiwanese Junior Chamber of Commerce San Francisco Bay Area(TJCCSFBA).
Through the first project, Chien gained the know-how of investment systems running and ways to monetize his investments, such as turning a spacious four-bedroom apartment into a 10-bedroom home, which results in doubled rental income. More importantly, he spotted the potential of private banking with the collective wealth of white-collar workers. The next generation in the U.S. alone will inherit a legacy worth USD$84 trillion within the next 20 years, according to Chien. By 2023, millennials will hold five times as much wealth as they do today, with 47% of which will be invested in wealth management firms.
Starting investment with an international vision, Chien with his family once invested in the lands in Indonesia, from where he sowed the seeds of global investment. GoodFin, the digital private banking platform serving investors all over the world, offers investment opportunities including private equity funds and early-stage companies.
GoodFin doesn’t evaluate and choose projects itself but connects with promising funds and VCs. One of the deals Y Combinator Summer 2022 includes a portfolio of YC companies in the 2022 summer batch, while GoodFin also has an investment option of a diversified portfolio of tech companies founded by Harward alumni. Moreover, the platform collaborates with leading fintech companies to gain access to top-tier private equity managers.
Eyeing the global markets of private banking and fintech, GoodFin also enables its users to own a US account to earn market-leading yield. In the long run, GoodFin plans to work with banks across the globe to facilitate private banking on a global scale.
With solid legal background and software expertise, Joo Fee and Chien have managed to build a platform that realizes boundary-free private banking.
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