Featured Startup Pitch: CityFALCON - Making financial news and analysis more widely available

CityFALCON screen COMPANY: CityFALCON

ELEVATOR PITCH

Democratizing access to financial news.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

We are redefining how financial news is sourced, curated, distributed and consumed. We provide comprehensive, real-time, and relevant financial news and tweets using social media, crowd curation, and proprietary algorithm.

Just like Klout Score rates people and their social influence, CityFALCON Score rates financial tweets, authors, and URLs. Our competitors hire 500 people in a contact center to curate news, but we will learn from hundreds of thousands of financial people on our platform; it’s not any different from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. If there are two hundred thousand stories for oil in a day, CityFALCON Score can give you the 10 stories that you should be looking at.

We serve retail investors, brokers, research firms, banks, hedge funds and CFOs at companies. We make money through:

1) Licensing fees/revenue share from businesses, a £17 billion financial information market; and 2) affiliate revenue from retail brokers, a £5 billion market.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

Key Differentiator from our competitors:

CityFALCON SCORE—we make sense of financial big data in a scalable way by scoring each news story and tweet based on three levels of curation:

1) Automated curation
2) Scalable curation by internal analysts
3) Crowd curation—Tens of thousands of users in the crowd can make better sense of data compared to by a few hundred people employed in contact centers by our competitors.

FOUNDER’S STORY

Ruzbeh Bacha, founder and CEO: Skype, Microsoft, Nokia, and KPMG; having 15-plus years of trading and investing experience and built the first version of CityFALCON 18 months back from his bedroom. Listed in UK FinTech Powerlist, nominated as Entrepreneur of the Year 2015 at British Entrepreneur Awards; ACA, MBA (Oxford), Ruby on Rails developer.

BUSINESS MODEL

Our Platform is free for retail investors and traders. We have a solid business model with three revenue streams:

1) Affiliate fees from retail brokers: 25-40 percent revenue share deals with 12 brokers in the UK
3) Licensing fees from B2B and B2B2C channels
4) Sponsorship/advertising revenue, big data play