CIO Bulletin – Cover Page

Merlin Investor’s Founder & CEO Guido Petrelli has been featured as the cover story in the special edition “20 Innovative Companies of the Year 2024” published by CIO Bulletin. Read the full interview as published in CIO Bulletin magazine. Merlin Investor – Democratizing finance and making conscious investing a reality for everyone In the dynamic landscape of finance, Merlin Investor emerges as a trailblazing company with a profound mission—to democratize financial inclusion and revolutionize investment planning towards conscious investing. With a commitment to making financial tools accessible to all, Merlin Investor introduces an innovative platform that encompasses market insights, investment planning, and portfolio tracking. This visionary Fintech company is not just about transactions; it’s on a quest to empower every retail investor, regardless of their financial knowledge or investment experience. Merlin Investor’s user-friendly interface and comprehensive features are designed to cater to a diverse audience, ensuring that investing is no longer confined to a select few but becomes a seamless experience for everyone. Moreover, Merlin Investor goes beyond the conventional by offering a cutting-edge white label technology. Financial Institutions can leverage this solution to elevate their digital platforms, capturing the attention of the new generation of retail investors. In an exclusive interview with CIO Bulletin, Guido Petrelli, Founder and CEO of Merlin Investor shared insights about how his company is providing a holistic investment experience—all in one place. Q. Can you share the story behind the founding of Merlin Investor? What inspired the establishment of the company, and how has the vision evolved over time? Merlin Investor originates from my personal need and experience that spans over 20 years as a retail investor. Opening my first brokerage account in my teenage years with minimal financial or investment knowledge, it initially served as a hobby with the hope of generating extra pocket money. As I progressed into adulthood and began working, I relied on financial advisors to manage my investments. However, I observed that my personal investments yielded better returns or incurred fewer losses compared to the performance delivered by the professional management I was paying for. This realization prompted me to take matters into my own hands. Thanks to my university degree in Business Administration and Finance I earned in the meantime, I recognized the importance of developing a diversified and balanced investment strategy before executing any trades. I understood that the key to financial success lies not just in the trading tool itself but in the thoughtful design and implementation of an effective investment strategy. This led me to create intricate, time-consuming, and frustrating spreadsheets. However, the realization struck that there should be a better, more accessible solution for everyone. In my search for a comprehensive tool that could meet my requirements for market insights, investment planning, and performance analysis, I was surprised to find a lack of suitable options. While numerous trading platforms emerged, they primarily focused on the trading experience rather than holistic investment management. Believing that many other retail investors faced the same challenge, I embarked on the journey to build the product I envisioned. Thus, Merlin Investor was born. Q. Can you provide a brief overview of the products or services offered by Merlin Investor? Our platform serves as an educational, strategizing, and tracking tool tailored for retail investment planning and management, catering to the new generation of retail investors. From its inception, the vision was to create an easy-to-use platform that complements, rather than substitutes, any trading platform. It was designed to accommodate all types of retail investors, irrespective of their financial knowledge or investing experience. The platform is flexible, allowing users to work with various asset types, delivering a customizable and scalable experience aligned with each investor’s specific needs and learning curve. Whether investors are experts or beginners, managing their funds or someone else’s, the investment cycle remains the same. The process is simplified into four main steps. The first involves studying the markets by accessing multiple sources of information to make informed decisions and identify assets of interest. Subsequently, users create multiple investment strategies to analyze and balance various risks associated with investing, such as asset allocation, industry, country, currency, and custodian risks. This diversification and risk balance follow a fundamental rationality that must be addressed to build long-term positive results, which is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” and when you invest, you have different baskets to consider. After analyzing top-down and comparing strategies, users select the one that aligns with their risk profile before moving on to the execution of the strategy. While several trading platforms already cover this third step, the fourth and final step involves tracking performance and rebalancing risks as necessary. The Merlin platform comprehensively addresses steps one, two, and four, positioning itself as the ideal companion to any trading platform. Its goal is to deliver a complete and conscious investing experience all in one place. Q. Merlin Investor emphasizes the idea of educating and empowering anyone to create their own investment strategy. How do you believe it sets Merlin apart in the industry? If we look at the world of investing, banks and financial advisors often formulate investment strategies tailored to the products they aim to promote. Unfortunately, these strategies are frequently constrained by the limited range of products they wish to place. Additionally, many active retail investors, despite having the ability to trade various assets across numerous platforms, often fail to execute based on a diversified and balanced plan. Instead, they engage in a series of spot trades, leading them to lose control of the overall investment landscape. This approach, characterized more as gambling than strategic investing, can result in catastrophic losses and missed investment targets. A survey conducted among active retail investors from Gen Z and Millennials revealed that approximately seventy percent of them were investing without a plan. The remaining participants were compelled to strategize using spreadsheets, like I used to. Further analysis indicated that over eighty percent of the surveyed population expressed a willingness to be educated and learn