Finhay startup received $1 million of investment

Finhay, a fintech (financial technology) startup in Vietnam, has announced to receive nearly $1 million from Insignia Venture Partners and other investment funds from Hong Kong and the US.

Nghiem Xuan Huy, Finhay's founder, was surprised with this achievement as the initial capital raising goal was only $500,000.

According to him, Finhay would spend this amount of new capital on attracting more users this year. Up to now, Finhay has had more than 13,000 users with a total investment of over $320,000.

Launched in the middle of 2017, Finhay is a platform including a website and an application. It aims at connecting small investors (whose investment capital starting from $2.16) with Vietnamese financial funds and providing them with financial management solutions. Customers can directly check their balance fluctuations (or asset values) after accessing financial fund products. In fact, similar models of fintech have been quite popular and developed around the world, but it is still strange in Vietnam.

Finhay's founding team consists of six people, including four full-time employees and two consultants. Three of them are financial experts, two are tech-savvy and one is specialised in user experience design.

The target customers of Finhay are young office workers aged from 25 to 28 whose salary is about $350 per month. They should have investment demands and a moderate amount of free money but tend to have little time and enjoy online experience.

Finhay’s highlight is to utilise technology to determine individual tastes and then propose a suitable structure to allocate the investment to financial funds accordingly. With Finhay, people can access financial investment funds more easily than before as they can start saving and investing with only about $2.16. Finhay focuses on automation, allowing customers to monitor and manage their investments.

Founder Nghiem Xuan Huy hoped that Finhay would become a popular capital-seeking channel for open funds and a secure place of saving and investing money for individual investors. Finhay can also help users build future plans such as buying a house, buying a car and saving for retirement.

In 2017, Finhay received capital and consultation from Nguyen Hoang Giang, former Director of VNDirect Securities Joint Stock Company. Soon after, H2 Ventures, an Australian investment fund, also invested in the company. After two rounds of capital calls, two investors invested over $100,000 more in Finhay.