Marcus Richards
Using machine learning, automation, and natural language understanding (NLU), fintech startup CityFALCON transforms unstructured financial content into structured data, generates analytics, extracts insights, and delivers personalised data to users and clients via web, mobile, API, voice, and chatbot platforms.
Enterprise clients include BNP Paribas, IEX Group, and several fintech companies from around the globe, who use our internal platforms, white-labelling, and API services.
Our goal is to democratise access to financial content for the 50m active traders, big and small organisations, and governments.
Tell us about yourself?
Ruzbeh holds an MBA from Oxford and a Machine Learning certificate from Stanford. He has worked at KPMG, Nokia, and Skype then Microsoft after the acquisition. When he tried to manage his own portfolio, he couldn’t find relevant data through the noise and thus built the MVP, a basic dashboard, which has evolved into the expansive platform that CityFALCON is today.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Just a couple years? Hire an HR manager earlier. Hiring for scaling up and relationship management has been taxing at times. A good HR manager could take over many of these tasks from the founder earlier.
Back to the founding of the business? Learn more best practices to build the initial version. We had to do a lot of retooling as we grew. Also to keep in mind future scalability on the DB and processing side of things.
There’s actually quite a few: https://www.cityfalcon.com/blog/the-startup-journey/9-product-and-technology-sins-of-a-founder-who-learnt-to-code/
What problem does your business solve?
First, there is simply too much irrelevant information. No individual or small team is able to process the information as fast as it is accumulating. That means a lot of wasted time, and often human teams miss emergent trends until it is too late to capitalise. We do it all automated, so it’s real-time and able to sift appropriately.
Second, professional data aggregating services charges thousands of dollars per month. That’s way out of reach for retail investors and even many startups. They also don’t have the greatest UX and UI, which we fix with intuitive designs.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
First, there is simply too much irrelevant information. No individual or small team is able to process the information as fast as it is accumulating. That means a lot of wasted time, and often human teams miss emergent trends until it is too late to capitalise. We do it all automated, so it’s real-time and able to sift appropriately.
Second, professional data aggregating services charges thousands of dollars per month. That’s way out of reach for retail investors and even many startups. They also don’t have the greatest UX and UI, which we fix with intuitive designs.
What is your magic sauce?
Financial content curation is not new; applying automation and NLU techniques is. Automation keeps prices affordable and data timely – machines tag, score, curate, and summarise in milliseconds, not hours or days.
Moreover, we do advanced processing in 20+ languages, with content in over 50 languages. We are global, while most competitors do one or two languages for their founding countries.
Finally, we combine the coverage and features. Most competitors focus only on a couple data sources (only cryptos or only filings, for example) or a couple features (just sentiment, just summarisation, etc.). We combine all of these into a one-stop-shop for due diligence and market monitoring.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Unicorn status, of course.
Realistically, we’d like to capture a chunk of the retail investing/trading world, either directly or through our B2B2C channels. Due to automation, we believe we can achieve high net margins, especially with those economies of scale. And naturally we’d be fulfilling our mission of democratising access to financial content.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
The biggest challenge is probably trying to balance cash flows, especially in a product company. We have to build the product first, unlike a service that we can monetise from Day 1. But developer salaries have rocketed in the past few years, which has made this difficult to balance.
The long lead times for big enterprise clients has also posed a challenge, as it means delayed income. It is also frustrating, sometimes for both sides, as negotiations get bogged down.
For changing course, we have been fortunate to stay the course pretty steadily. Through Brexit, nearly running out of cash, and Covid, we’ve kept true to the mission of democratising access to financial content. It’s all about properly prioritising for the market, so the order of product features and aspects may move around, but the final product is still there.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Get started for free on our web and mobile platforms on our homepage, cityfalcon.com.
We do have Premium content, with prices and content available detailed here: https://www.cityfalcon.com/pricing
And if you want API access, check out our API page: https://www.cityfalcon.com/products/api/financial-news/pricing-api/commercial
For those interested in joining us on the journey: https://www.cityfalcon.com/invest
