Australian FinTech company profile #164 – LENSELL
- Company Name: LENSELL PTY LTD
- Website: https://lensell.online
- Key Staff & Titles: Dr Laura Rusu, Founder & CEO
- Location(s): 408 / 566 St Kilda Road, Melbourne VIC 3004
- In one sentence, what does your fintech do?
LENSELL helps retail investors and professional investment advisors take their portfolios to the next performance level, with the help of data and technology.
- How / why did you start your fintech company?
As an investor myself, I became frustrated by the lack of applications available, that could give more transparency and allow a higher level of control during my investing journey. All I could find were analyst recommendations about certain investments, plenty of share price graphs and scores of trading applications. None of those was able to help me understand the level of risk I was taking with my investments, whether they together were able to help me reach my financial goals, and whether I could improve on anything in my portfolio to better its performance. In short, tools available were focused on transacting only, but an efficient investing journey requires much more than that.
Given my computer science background and expertise in building software systems, I decided that things must change – for myself and for all retail investors out there who wanted to do more than follow a trend. I wanted to ‘do better and get more’, hence the motto of our business. So, I took decades old, Nobel prize winning, financial research and applied state of the art technology on top of it. I also built a tool to save hours and extract financial fundamental data, simply because manual data extraction is nonsensical in this day and age.
- What is the best thing your company has achieved or learnt along the way (this can include awards, capital raising etc)?
As a team, we are very proud of what we’ve achieved so far, a product that is unique not only on the Australian market but also globally. I am also very proud of the team I’ve built, a small group of very intelligent and hardworking people. Last but not least, I am proud that after two years we’ve managed to move into our own office in Melbourne and set the base for greater things to come.
- What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?
I would tell them directly that getting a start-up off the ground is not an easy job, especially for bootstrapped companies. It required perseverance and many sacrifices, but if you have an idea that you think is worth the effort, go for it and stay the course.
- What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focussed on Australia?
We have already started to investigate expansion to US, with the addition of US stocks into one of our applications, Diversiview. Other markets are in line as well.
Another application that we’ve developed, Table Bits (a financial statements extractor, from PDF to CSV) is not market specific and we have started to promote that globally as well.
Our third application, Polairis, is currently focused on Australia as it allows investors see which companies have polluting facilities across the country and take ethical investment decisions accordingly.
- What other fintechs or companies do you admire?
It’s difficult to name one. I admire all companies and founders that challenge the status quo and build systems and applications that help the humanity one way or another. I admire people who bring real progress and betterment in other people’s lives.
- What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?
Most interesting was a sudden realisation I had that our products seem to be living and breathing and seem to have a way of growing themselves into complex, beautiful and useful applications. We only help with our tech skills along the way.
(I checked this last response with a psychologist; he proffered no reasons for concern, but he is biased since he is my husband.)
