ShereIt, formerly Bw8 Trading, is a Singaporean global social trading network that allows non-professional investors to identify expert traders, follow them and copy their trades and actions.
Social trading, which started to gain popularity in the early 2010s, is the process through which online financial investors rely on user generated financial content. These content are gathered from various applications and constitute the major information source for making financial trading decisions.
Through social trading, participation in the market has significantly increased and led to a rise in volume of trades going through. Additionally, brokers see them as new growth engines for converting new and retaining old clients.
As of today, the leading social trading platforms and networks are eToro, a social trading and brokerage company with registered offices in Cyprus, Israel and the UK, and ZuluTrade, a startup headquartered in Athens, Greece. Both companies have a community of more than 10,000 validated traders to copy.
However, unlike other social trading platforms, ShereIt aims to build a global network where individuals, banks and brokers can connect.
“What makes us different is that we aim to connect all brokers and their customers to our network,” said Amar Banwait, CEO and founder at ShereIt. “This way traders can trade together even if they aren’t with the same broker.”
He continued:
“Investing has always been social, the best source of information is our friends and family. People we trust.”
In this sense, ShereIt has created a mobile social trading network in order for people to easily and transparently share trades and ideas: the best way to get an education and the confidence to trade by themselves, Banwait argued.
ShereIt is white-labeled to brokerage firms, who pay ShereIt a commission for each trade executed on the social network and a monthly per-user fee for all their clients using the platform. Traders access the platform via their existing broker account through a mobile app.
The platform has already caught the interest of four of the biggest banks and Singapore, Banwait said.
ShereIt is an alumni of Startupbootcamp Fintech 2015 Singapore, a program backed by Singapore’s central bank that aims to accelerate promising projects and startups from Asia. Demo Day, which occurred in July, featured 11 fintech startups, among which Dragon Wealth, To
ast, CreditSeva and Otonomos, to name a few.
“The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) have been a great support during this program,” said Markus Gnirck, co-founder and global COO at Startupbootcamp Fintech.