Digital Strategy FinTech Interview: Foxstone CEO

By Z Team digital strategy interviews November 15, 2017

Foxstone is a Swiss startup offering a crowdfunding real-estate investment platform from CHF 25’000.

Z Digital Agency manager, Timothee Bardet, wanted to interview Dan Amar, CEO of Foxstone, because this startup is shaping the future of the PropTech industry, with process simplification and democratization for the real-estate investments.

What is your vision of the Swiss Real Estate market right now, and in 5 years ?

The real estate market in Switzerland is very crowded and with clear discrepancies. The market is known for its lack of transparency, for all stakeholders. Therefore it leads to a number of areas were Fintech startup have a numerous opportunities.

However the Swiss real-estate market is a slow adopter.

Nonetheless real-estate services will have no choice but to digitalize, to operate a better service at a lower cost.

For property management companies, even if digitalization is on its way, it won’t be a critical matter as its cost impact on yields for investment funds is marginal.

There is no real tendency affecting the yield level, but the digitalization will simply offer some market shares to new players, affecting the old balance between stakeholders.

Indeed smaller players will be more agile to structure themselves and bring a higher execution value, while avoiding the cost of heavy regulations.

What are Foxstone biggest challenges right now ?

Foxstone is currently building its investors community and property deal-flow. This is our focus.

What is the Foxstone differentiation strategy to reach real-estate investors ?

Our ideal clients are both investment funds and retail investors. With a full digitalization of the process and a minimum ticket from 25’000 CHF, Foxstone enables a broader and faster approach to real-estate investment.

How can a FinTech convince traditional real-estate investors ?

The competition has already proven our business model. There is a need for better and broader investment management capabilities. CHF 200 Millions have already been invested with this new approach.

However for a FinTech startup to succeed at convincing investors, four criteria should be checked:

the size of the existing deal flow
the credibility of the FinTech: its team experience (and licences if required)
the execution: can it provide a better, faster (and cheaper) service ?
the investors in the company are also bringing credibility

For Foxstone some additional key elements are helping us convincing new investors:

our partners, some of the main players in Switzerland
the testimonials after some deals got closed via Foxstone
the testimonials from other stakeholders of a typical real-estate deal, like banks for instance

How would you describe Foxstone digital strategy ?

In addition to our direct reach towards open and innovative funds, we leverage the online community on professional and social networks, since the minimum ticket starts at 25’000CHF.

Magazines, conferences and meetups are also a good way to explain our differentiation and build relationships.

Finally with its knowledge of the market and trends, Foxstone aims at becoming an opinion leader, providing online contents for its community.

And you, what is your digital strategy ?

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