#20: Thomas Perret

Radical Departures

Episode 20 - Thomas Perret - Revolutionizing Personal Investment

Key points:

• During school, worked two different internships that helped provides ideas and inspiration for Mon Petit Placement

• Saw the need for diversity of investments but also need to educate younger people

• Gamifying investing using technology could have better results for young investors

• Target audience wants more transparency, less black box approach

• Biggest obstacle so far has been engaging with large corporates, who are still learning how to work with startups. It’s a learning process!

• Moving forward, eyeing green and water investments, which are of great interest

• EU MiFid II laws will help to unify banking regulation across countries

Thomas comes from a financial and statistics background. The banking world gave him insight into the world of investing and why it made a lot more sense than letting money sit in a simple savings account, where it wouldn’t earn much interest.

Thomas also worked for a startup that was doing interesting things but failed, which taught him other lessons. The idea was good but you need more than just a good idea to be successful. Also, failure is not the end of the world provided you take a step back and look at what happened. There’s a lot of value in learning from mistakes.

In addition, many of Thomas’s friends and family heard him talk about his work in finance, but they really didn’t know that much about the specifics. They viewed the world of investment as risky - which it can be - but after talking about the risk/reward and educating them, he saw the potential in creating a fintech solution.

His goal was to help educate young investors so they could diversify their holdings and do better than the sub-inflation returns of traditional savings accounts. By democratizing the system, where higher returns were more likely, he could entice young investors and also bring benefits to old fashioned banks.

His biggest challenge so far will be a familiar story for many startups: as we’ve heard from others, including Ethan Pierse, today’s big corporates need to take innovation and engagement with startups very seriously if they want to be as influential tomorrow.