Pras Indrakumar pitches Bank of Data, an Australian digital private bank for crypto assets. Australia has 500,000 crypto holders but traditional banks won't handle deposits or custody. Bank of Data plans to launch in the ASIC sandbox with a subscription model covering trading, custody, and portfolio management, targeting 5,000 customers by year 3 with AU$200-220k in funding.
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Presenting Bank of Data Digital Asset Tech Association. Introducing our team. I'm the CEO, Pras, and the CFO is Arno. Our CTO is Purva. Natasha is our COO, and Eileen, our CMO. There have been a growing number of crypto holders in Australia, rising in 2017 to about 100,000, and now in 2021, we're hitting close to 500,000 crypto holders. ATO has recently announced that they're monitoring about 600,000 crypto holders in terms of paying taxes. But we have a bigger problem at stake. Australian customers cannot use their crypto assets at their banks. They can't deposit, can't withdraw, they can't access on EFTPOS machines, they can't access on ATMs, they can't use their crypto assets as collateral to borrow, to buy houses, and so on. In terms of their private banking and wealth management, they can't invest in this asset class and invest into funds and have their portfolios managed. And hence there's an opportunity here in the market, especially with these growing number of investors in the market with limited knowledge and no support from private banks. There's been market changes, regulatory changes. ASIC has recently done a consultation paper in order to allow customers and getting feedback from the ecosystem. And also there's curious investors who are looking to enter this asset class and start diversifying. There's institutional investors and family offices looking to get into this asset class. Bank of Data will have a competitive advantage because we'll be the first mover in terms of providing a low-cost subscription fee model, a zero fee to disrupt the standard fee-based model in the private banking and wealth management industry. The end-to-end private banking in terms of digital private banking service is what we're going to be providing from onboarding customer KYC/AML, allowing the customer to invest, to buy and sell crypto assets on an over-the-counter desk, a secured platform, which is institutional-grade insured custody to manage this portfolio on a wealth management portal, Provide a personalized service through technology-driven relationship managers and a learn platform for them to receive weekly insights and market updates, regular reports, an education portal. The technology we're using right from the start is an end-to-end blockchain permission blockchain, which will be all integrated. And there's various APIs and white label solutions we're using right from Metaco, which is coming into providing the onboarding and the trade to buy and sell these assets. Tradair is being plugged in for the streaming liquidity and access to liquidity providers and prime brokers. Fireblocks is being implemented as the custody solution. This is the multi-part computation, which is the MPC technology, which is the best of the breed in the world, starting to be used by a lot of the bigger banks. And we're seeing BY Mellon, Standard Chartered investing. PayPal acquired the largest, second largest competitor in this space, which was Curve last year for about close to $500 million. So this space is the core of what we're gonna be implementing. Managing the client portfolio through wealth manual, we picked Australia's best wealth management technology at the moment, FinClear, which we're providing the clearinghouse. And FinClear is also integrating with ASX with their DAML, which is also built on blockchain. Now the AI chatbot we're implementing is Mina to provide that personalized private banking experience for our clients. And finally, we're implementing Morocco's gamification app and technology for the learn and education. All will be sitting on Amazon Web Services as our data servers, and we'll be launching with the ASIC sandbox in the innovation hub. The target market, we're going across baby boomers, millennials, Gen Z, and alpha. And the initial traction we're looking at is the millennials because 34% of our current crypto holders are millennials. So hence we'll be using them as our initial target group, targeting them through social media and direct marketing. And because they're already private bank customers and brokers, we're actually partnering with these existing large private banks and brokers and some of the biggest in Australia, such as Crestone UBS, Credit Suisse, some of the stockbrokers like Ord Minnett and Canaccord who are already in this space. Now, the regulatory sandbox will give us a competitive edge because we'll be having that license for the first 2 years through the Australian Financial Services Test License. And the predicted growth rate, we're looking at the first year to grow to about 500 customers and then to ramping up to close to 5,000 by year 3. Now, direct competitors in Australia are XeroCap, which is a digital asset firm, and then there's Caleb& Brown, which is providing a cryptocurrency brokerage. Both are therefore disruptive in terms of consolidation and potential acquisition targets for us into the future. Right now, you know, we're looking at indirect competitors as well, The Vault and the Judo Bank, who have banking license. And we think that, you know, as soon as the regulation opens up, these are the to, with the digital license, to actually start disrupting the space in terms of providing that service. The funding we're looking for is about $200,000, $220,000, and that'll be used across 20% in legal and 40% in CapEx because a lot of the cost is going towards the licensing and our technology. There's marketing of 25% and salary only 10% because we're gonna be staying nimble and fully technology-driven. And why invest into Bank of Data is because we are customer-centric and we will be end-to-end technology-driven providing a private banking and wealth management service for the Australian market. You will be hearing the name Bank of Data
