Thomas Ketchell’s Post

🇧🇪 If you're an investor in Belgium who needs to declare the TOB (Tax on Stock Exchange Transactions or taxe boursière / beurstaks) but unsure where to start, we're here to help! We wrote a comprehensive guide where we will walk you through the process of handling your own TOB declaration. If you're investing with a broker that doesn't handle TOB (like Interactive Brokers, Trade Republic, eToro, etc) this can be quite the administrative burden. For example, to calculate the TOB for an ETF transaction, follow these steps: 1) Determine the transaction value 2) Determine the TOB rate 3) Multiply the transaction value by the TOB rate Remember that you need to repeat this process for every transaction (both buying and selling) you undertook for the period you want to declare TOB for. So it is possible that different transactions have a different TOB rate. 🔗 is in the comments with the "how to" declare too!

I'm curious to hear your thoughts. It's starting to become quite commonplace for startups to raise money through crowdfunding. It's clear that the benefits are there: - Easier way to raise money rather than going the VC route - Helps you generate buzz for your startup - Get your early members to be part "owners" in your business However, I'm a bit uneasy when fintechs raise this way. Considering many offer investment apps and services, does it really make sense for them to push their customers to invest in their startups? Considering 90% of startups fail, it's not really the best way to have your customers potentially lose their money. Recent examples are BUX, Freetrade and Selma Finance. Selma is all about investing the right way through ETFs, then why push their own users to take a risky investment into a startup? Am I interpreting this the wrong way?

If you're a Curvo member there's a good chance you share our vision. Our financial future is threatened, and we want to solve that problem. Demographic changes, pension crisis and inflation are putting pressure on the prospects of Europe's young people. And we are convinced that good investing is a crucial tool to better prepare ourselves. You most likely saw last week that we raised €500,000 to help us get closer to solving this problem but what does this mean to you as a member? 📱 A better app experience. There is still so much we want to do in the product to help you better prepare for your financial future. We're excited to work on this. 🪨 Further assurance that "we'll be around in the future". All of you who decided to invest your savings through us, an extremely young company, have taken a big leap of faith. And we greatly appreciate that. This capital strengthens our position in the market and gives us a financial cushion to ensure our survival to some extent. Here's our monthly update with our latest metrics, app updates and press mentions 👇

Curvo just raised €500,000 as a seed round. In non-investor terms, this means we've raised money for the company which we can now invest in growing and improving the product. You know we strive for being open as a team so we thought it would make sense to share the pitch deck we used. A pitch deck is usually a presentation that entrepreneurs use to showcase their product startup to potential investors and partners. It is typically created as a visual aid to support a verbal presentation. What usually happens is that you send the deck out to a bunch of investors, many of them ghost you or they reply back with a "no". Some however are intrigued to learn more. You may be wondering how we managed to convince investors to believe in our project? It's a mix - it wasn't the pitch deck alone but it did help. We received a lot of rejections at first but we also found investors, mentors and entrepreneurs who shared our vision of solving the pension crisis. Growth solves a lot your problems and we're glad that our members and assets continued to grow whilst we were raising the funds. Here's our deck👇

🚀 Huge news. We raised €500,000 in seed capital with Curvo! 🚀 Our financial future is threatened, and we want to solve that problem. Demographic changes, pension crisis and inflation are putting pressure on the prospects of Europe's young people. And we are convinced that good investing is a crucial tool to better prepare ourselves. 🤔 What does the fundraise mean to you as a member? 📱 A better app experience. There is still so much we want to do in the product to help you better prepare for your financial future. 🪨 More assurance that "we'll be around in the future". All of you who decided to invest your savings through us, an extremely young company, have taken a big leap of faith. And we greatly appreciate that. This strengthens our position in the market and gives us a financial cushion to ensure our survival to some extent. ☝️ What does it give us? 📈 Opportunity to grow faster. "Build it and they will come" remains a myth. You can make the best product in the world, but it's wasted effort if no one knows about it. We will now have more resources to reach more potential members. 🧠 Valuable mentors. We are lucky that our investors bring much more than "just money". Olivier Verdin, Sabba Keynejad, Nicolas Hulsmans, Brice Le Blevennec, Sébastien Dellis, Pieter Van den Eynde, Cindy Naegel, Matthias Plancke, Jean-Philippe Mathieu and the BeAngels network each bring their super valuable expertise to help us make Curvo a success story. 🖐️ Accountability. We are now more accountable not only to ourselves, but also to our investors who believe in our mission. This is good pressure. 🔴 What have we given up? 🍰 Part of our company (although Yoran and I remain majority shareholders). 🕛 Time. Raising capital is a significant distraction. Every minute we pitched (often with a "no" answer) was a minute we couldn't use to improve the app. And the Belgian bureaucracy around fundraising was 😬 🙋♂️ Big thanks to Emile-Victor who helped us craft the pitch deck and Nicolas who helped structure our story and who was a great sounding board during the whole process. And of course our wonderful members who continue to trust Curvo with their savings! If you are a founder yourself and would like to talk to us raising money, don't hesitate to message us. 🔗 in the comments.

We had a lot of questions related to buying ETFs through DEGIRO's "core selection" so we thought we would help out more investors. DEGIRO has a "core selection" of over 200 ETFs for which they charge only a €1 transaction fee, instead of €3 for all their other ETFs. They call this €1 fee a "handling fee". ETFs in the core selection include those provided by the largest fund providers like BlackRock and Vanguard. You can buy an ETF in DEGIRO's core selection if you follow two things: 1. buy on the right exchange 2. respect the fair use policy However, as you can see in the screenshot, even if you search for the popular VWCE by typing its ISIN code "IE00BK5BQT80", you'll see several results. They all correspond to the same ETF, but on different exchanges. For instance, Vanguard trades on XETRA, Tradegate Exchange, Borsa Italiana... To pay €1 instead of €3, it's important with DEGIRO to buy VWCE on XETRA ("XET"). We explain how everything works in our latest article. I've added the link in the comments.

I was fortunate to be invited to talk at the International Workshop AIFIn - The Financial Innovation Think Tank organised by Sergio Spaccavento. My presentation yesterday was titled "How being customer driven is impacting the next generation of investors": 📱 I walked through the "why" of Curvo, how we started and where we're going 🗣️ How Yoran and I remain customer focused and continuing to provide value to our members by listening to their suggestions and ideas 💯 Our openness with our metrics (# of members, market performance, experiments) and why it resonates with our members I love how it still feels like we're just getting started with Curvo. There's still so much we can do for millennials across the EU!

🎁 I'm pleased to announce our surprise that we teased out last week. We've reduced the fees to use Curvo 🎁 Starting from today, you'll pay less the more you invest through the app. As Curvo is built for long-term savings, we wanted to move to a system where you pay less as you continue investing through the app. This change of fee structure is also based on your suggestions. So thank you for continuing to share how we can improve the app.

We're now over 1,150 members who are actively using the Curvo app with over €2.6m invested. We added another 100 members to Curvo in the last month. Our highlights in May: 📱Leave Curvo a review: you may now receive a prompt to rate the Curvo app on the App Stores next time you open the app. 💰 Tax season: you should have received instructions within the app to declare your account in your yearly tax form. 🎁 Surprise: we have an exciting announcement in the next couple of weeks so do keep an eye out here on Linkedin.