Tom McGillycuddy (left) and Matt Latham (right)

I started working in financial services in September 2011, moving to London from Wigan where I’m from. I met Matt Latham, the other founder of tickr, on my first day on the Barclays grad scheme, and we bonded over being the two northern grads on the scheme (he’s from Liverpool). We are the first people in our families to go to university, work in finance, and move to London, and we both felt like outsiders straight away. Initially, we were blinded by the shiny lights and buildings in Canary Wharf and felt like we were stupid and way behind our peers.

I honestly never considered starting my own business until I’d spent a few years in finance. I felt like I’d been let behind the curtain, been shown how finance works and realised that it was largely inefficient, charged extortionate fees to unsuspecting customers, and had been designed to confuse ordinary people like me. It also seemed geared up to earn revenue and profit indiscriminately, with no real thought about where this money came from and the impact of it; and all of that just didn’t sit well with me at all.

After leaving Barclays to join Wellington Management, I started to think that if we – Matt and I – weren’t going to solve the problems we could see, who would do it? This pushed us over the line to start tickr, but I think it took us a few years to learn about an industry in detail, before we could see what was truly wrong with it, to then leave and try and address the problems we found.

Where did your interest in investing come from? And where and when did you come up with the idea for Tickr?

My interest in investing came from just wanting to know how the world works. Understanding finance gives you that context. It’s an industry that encompasses economics, politics, behavioural science, psychology, and a whole host of other disciplines, and that fascinated me. In a capitalist system, understanding capital markets and the flow of money is parallel to understanding the world. And if you understand it, then you can change it.

But it wasn’t until I started at Wellington in 2014 that I properly learned about investing in a granular way. I was surrounded by a group of intelligent people, world leaders in their fields, and I tried to soak up as much knowledge as I could from them.

Doing so I became more convinced that if we could channel all this knowledge and money to companies and people doing good stuff for the world, then we could change the world in the process. This led me to impact investing: investing in companies to earn money and have a positive impact on the planet. I started working in the impact team at Wellington after convincing their Head of Impact Investing to take me on (with an impassioned caffeine-fuelled rant about changing the world!)

Whilst working in a team, investing money for pension funds and family offices, Matt and I started to think: why is there no way for us to do this easily with our own money? Again, it felt like ordinary people were being excluded from something that we thought had mass appeal. So in 2016, we started working on the idea that would eventually become tickr, with the aim of bringing impact investing to everyone, especially people new to investing.

How does it work as a means of ensuring people's money goes into the right investments?

We have created a series of themed portfolios that address impact causes, like climate change and equality.

In the portfolios are hundreds of established global business that address the themes, normally through their revenue. For example, the climate change theme has renewable energy businesses in it, that get all their revenue from, say, building wind farms.

Revenue is the purest way to determine an impact company, as they are selling the thing that has a positive impact, and it’s the cleanest thing to measure. We use this data to create our themes, and then our users get to choose which theme they like the most, at a risk level they feel comfortable with.

Where is the app today in terms of numbers of users/downloads? What external investment has it had and from where? And how many staff work at Tickr and what's the current turnover?

We started January 2019 with effectively 0 users, bar some family and friends, and now in September 2019 we have tens of thousands of people using the app.

Here is the profile of our user base today:

31 years old on average
40% female
50% haven’t invested before
On average they are investing £120 each month with us
70% based outside of London

We’ve proven that millennials want to invest and have the money to do it. Two things very few people thought we could do.

So far, we have raised £2.5M in external funding, and have built the team from 3 of us in January, to now 14 with offices in London and Liverpool. We have a young and hungry team that are bound together by our mission and what we stand for as a business.

What’s next for the business? Where do you see the trend for more ethical/high impact investing heading in the next 5 years?

Ultimately, we want to be the most convenient way for anyone to have a positive impact on the world. The tickr app as you see it today – aligning your investments with companies addressing big problems – is just the beginning. Finances should be stacked in favour of the user, and benefit the planet, and we will shake up the industry with these two things in mind.

In order to get to the next stage, you’ll see us strengthen our team, scale our user base in the UK and in Europe, and lay the groundwork for some real innovation in the European funds market and within our own business model. All with positive impact as the guiding light.

I think within the next 5-10 years impact investing will just be called investing. Our generation is starting to invest more, and have more money, and this structural shift in consumer attitudes and the change in whose hands the money is in will transform financial services and make it unrecognisable within the next 5 years.

We’ll be at the forefront of that, as the first to market impact investment app in Europe, and companies that don’t understand this shift will be left behind.

What's been your company’s greatest achievement so far?

Overall I would say the team we’ve built is our greatest achievement so far. We have a young and hungry team that are bound together by our mission and what we stand for as a business.

We started in January 2019 from scratch, and now in September 2019 we’ve raised £2.5M in external funding, and have grown from there being 3 of us to 14 with offices in London and Liverpool. We’ve gone from zero users to tens of thousands in nine months, and we couldn’t have done it without the team.

We set out with the long-term goals of channelling billions of pounds into impact companies around the world, providing financial education to millions of people, and ultimately helping make a difference to a billion lives. The accomplishments we’ve achieved so far this year tells me that’s certainly not unachievable.

What has been your biggest challenge?

When my co-founder, Matt Latham, and I started working on the idea in 2016, we had to do it on the sides of two jobs in investment management, which involved 60-70 hour weeks. I used to work on the idea in the morning before work, then Matt would pick up in the evening, and we would speak and work together at the weekend. That was certainly challenging.

The first few years involved a lot of exploration and figuring out how to launch an investment company we funded ourselves (you don’t know what you don’t know until you start, and then realise you really don’t know much, but you’ve no choice but to learn it fast!).

When it got closer to us being able to launch, we worked hard to land some angel funding to get it off the ground. We both then left our jobs and raised further capital from investors in the industry – mainly senior people at the organisations we used to work for – and a family office based in The Netherlands,

This enabled us to get regulated and launch the first version of the app to family and friends in October 2018, prior to a wider launch in January 2019 on iOS.

What are your plans for hitting your targets this year?

In order to get to the next stage, you’ll see us strengthen our team, scale our user base in the UK and in Europe, and lay the groundwork for some real innovation in the European funds market and within our own business model. All with positive impact as the guiding light.

I think within the next 5-10 years, impact investing will just be called investing. Our generation is starting to invest more, and have more money, and this structural shift in consumer attitudes and the change in whose hands the money is in will transform financial services and make it unrecognisable within the next five years.

We’ll be at the forefront of that, as the first to market impact investment app in Europe, and companies that don’t understand this shift will be left behind.

What's the one piece of advice you’d give fellow entrepreneurs?

Find a co-founder that you trust with your life.

Matt and I have been lucky in many ways along the journey so far, but the biggest bit of luck is having each other. To bounce ideas off, to de-stress and play therapist to one another, and to share the workload. We’re similar but different enough to work effectively together, and we wouldn’t have gotten off the ground if we were doing this solo.

Something else that’s fundamental is to be astutely aware of what you’re good and bad at. Double down on what you are good at, and hire people in the areas that you’re weak. One of the main things founders have to do to succeed is to build a great team, and you can’t do that unless you’re self-aware.

So far, tickr has raised around $3 mn in funding. How does Tickr plan to use the proceeds from the funds to strengthen and expand its business?

Ultimately, we want to be the most convenient way for anyone to have a positive impact on the world. The tickr app as you see it today – aligning your investments with companies addressing big problems – is just the beginning. Finances should be stacked in favour of the user, and benefit the planet, and we will shake up the industry with these two things in mind.

You’ll see us strengthen our team, scale our user base in the UK and in Europe, and lay the groundwork for some real innovation in the European funds market and within our own business model. All with positive impact as the guiding light.

Can you tell us more about the funds tickr invests in?

We’ve created a series of themed portfolios that address impact causes, like climate change and equality.

In the portfolios are hundreds of established global businesses that address the themes, normally through their revenue. For example, the climate change theme has renewable energy businesses in it, that get all their revenue from, say, building wind farms.

Revenue is the purest way to determine an impact company, as they are selling the thing that has a positive impact, and it’s the cleanest thing to measure. We use this data to create our themes, and then our users get to choose which theme they like the most, at a risk level they feel comfortable with.

How has the pandemic impacted tickr and its business in the last few months?

We are fortunate in that we are one of the businesses that has performed well during the pandemic.

Monthly revenue has increased by 300%, and our assets under management have been growing 30% month over month. In fact, during the pandemic, we have had, consecutively since March, our best months ever as a business.

And I think this speaks to the changing nature of the world, especially for our generation. We want to invest in our own future, but we want to do it in a way that we see the future: more sustainable and more equitable for everyone.

What is the future of impact investing?

I think within the next 5-10 years, impact investing will just be called investing. Our generation is starting to invest more, and have more money, and this structural shift in consumer attitudes and the change in whose hands the money is in will transform financial services and make it unrecognisable within the next five years.

We’ll be at the forefront of that, as the first to market impact investment app in Europe, and companies that don’t understand this shift will be left behind.

What are the key markets that tickr is focusing on to expand its fintech services? In particular, why those markets?

When thinking about our product expansion it’s important to understand our DNA as a business. We want to become an impact company, where every customer interaction with the app results in a positive impact. Every product and service is looked at through this lens.

This guiding light allows us to move into any areas that we see as genuinely impactful for our customers and the world. For example, soon we will be launching features that allow our customers to understand, offset and reduce their carbon footprint. This initial step creates a business that empowers customers to invest in impactful solutions with their money, and then have a direct impact on the climate simultaneously.