Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 1)

The Jobs Act has introduced the notion of democratization in investing. The issue is not as simple as it sounds. There are lots of gaps in doing this safely.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Craig Cecilio: I’m the CEO and Founder of Diversyfund. We’re a platform with a vision that everyone has an equal opportunity to build wealth. We’ve created a micro-investing platform to allow people to invest as little as $500. We aggregate the dollars together and invest them in alternative investments.

Our first product today is multi-family real estate. The company has been around for six years. Over 30,000 people have invested and we’ve about 600,000 account signups. We’re growing year over year, so we’ve had a fantastic time period the last four or five years.

Sramana Mitra: Is the company venture-funded?

Craig Cecilio: Since we have a crowdfunding platform, we crowdfunded it ourselves. We raised about $20 million through retail investors. Before that, we bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Let me start with the community that you have been helping invest in. How did you find this community? Where are these people from?

Craig Cecilio: I’ve been doing syndication and raising capital since the last 90s. It’s been a natural and organic move for me to do this. The Jobs Act has allowed us to solicit everyday investors. We started through email campaigns and getting the word out. There’s a lot of press in the early days. It was a hot subject.

The first couple of years, we were out in the press a lot more. Then crypto came out. The press left and we used paid ads and organic. We were fortunate in the first few years that we were able to develop a community, and that community started growing organically.

Sramana Mitra: What is the segment? Who is your target investor?

Craig Cecilio: Anyone 18 to 65 years age bracket across the United States. If you’re younger, we have tools and options for you. If you’re a little bit further along, we have premier plans and special plans. One of the biggest things we’ve uncovered in this whole process is the educational components for people. It was very surprising to me how much education and content we have to push so people can understand the asset classes we invest in. There seems to be not a lot of awareness about it. Since there is no awareness, people don’t know about it.

Sramana Mitra: What are you discovering? You said you have 600,000 investors. What is the profile?

Craig Cecilio: It’s across the board. We segment it into four groups right now. I don’t like to say younger. You have to cross-reference educational and financial backgrounds. Young people are financially astute already. That’s another layer. It’s hard to target people based on their financial knowledge. That’s what we’re learning. As we grow, we’re collecting that data so we can better design the content for people. You can be 45 years old and this could be new to you.

Sramana Mitra: What are those four segments?

Craig Cecilio: We have 45 plus, 35 to 45, and then 25 to 35. There’s another one that’s older.

Sramana Mitra: It’s age-based.

Craig Cecilio: Yes, age and overlap the financial acumen. That’s a tough thing. When someone first comes on board, you don’t have that much information. It’s easy to understand the demographics of where they live, the zip code, and their age. To get that other layer of data, you get that later on as a customer sticks around.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio
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