South African co-founders launch fintech start-up Alpha Exchange
Two South African co-founders have launched Alpha Exchange, a next generation institutional research and knowledge sharing platform and announced over 30 institutional partnerships this week in NYC and will next week take part in Africa Tech Summit London.
The co-founding team, Emma Margetts, Scott Winship and Alex Santos (from the Techstars Barclays Accelerator cohort) are working with industry leaders to pioneer the future of investment knowledge discovery in this new ‘priced’ regulatory driven world.
“Analysts are drowning in information overload. The current research model is legacy driven, archaic and broken. So we created Alpha Exchange, the first open financial network and knowledge exchange for this fragmented capital markets community” Margetts, CEO & co-founder tells Appsafrica.com.
Margetts and Winship, spent years on either side of this industry. Winship spent a decade as a fund manager, often receiving up to 1000 emails a day in uncustomized and irrelevant research. As a research provider, Margetts experienced the challenges of providing targeted content to the right clients and the struggle to get paid for her research.
The company goes beyond the traditional research report ‘aggregation’ approach. They turn the current model on its head. “Alpha Exchange is about building a research network for the 21st century. We help you access hard to reach pools of quality insight from across the USA, Europe and Africa.” says Winship.
African Ambition
“Our African ambitions start with our local South African market where financial markets are the most advanced and the research market is developed. There are a number of high quality experts and vendors who provide excellent insights and we are engaged with many for on the platform,” Margetts tells Appsafrica.
Alpha Exchange have also have tapped into the extensive commodities expertise from across the continent, “helping our clients access hard to reach pools of quality African expertise from Nigeria to South Africa.”
Margetts is excited about the future of Fintech in Africa, “we are just getting started, what an exciting journey for our startup community. So much potential as smartphone, internet penetration and buying power grows. We are thrilled to see the activity culminating on the continent with the launch of a variety of incubators/accelerators supporting entrepreneurs from Techstars Cape Town to Silicon Cape in South Africa”.
Alpha Exchange will be exhibiting at Africa Tech Summit London on September 29th.
