A Open 2nd Round £250k Fintech EIS Raise with HMRC Advanced Assurance

For video see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhz91y04SgU

Introduction

Compare Investments Dot Guru Ltd (CIDG) was originally registered as VN Carbon Capture (Oil) Ltd in April 13. The company never traded and changed its name to Compare Investments Dot Guru Ltd on the 9th December 2014.

In 2014 the Directors, (an industry recognised SEIS, EIS, BPR & VCT technical team that had previously provided objective and qualitative reviews on opportunities offered in the market), recognised an opportunity to provide a directory service for potential investors and interested parties that listed all publicly available investment products. This information would be held in a central database and made available via subscription to a .guru domain.

The Company raised £150,000 in a single round of funding via a ‘New Founder Shareholder’ offering, issuing 150 Ordinary Shares at £1000.00 per share. The proceeds were used by the Company to purchase a range of .guru domain names, design, develop, deliver the main www.compareinvestments.guru site,  build and populate the comparison portal www.comparealternativeinvestments.guru. Funding also maintained the business during its first year of operation whilst the FCA position was examined, the website was soft-launched and tested with ‘real-time’ subscribers.

After seeking specialist legal opinion re FCA rules governing this activity, the Company decided against applying for either ‘Appointed Representative’ status or FCA registration, having received legal advice that the company’s activities were outside the current regulatory framework.

Executive Summary

Company Objectives

The objective of the company is to develop a specialist online data-warehouse/directory website with subscriptions for access to the online scores, reports and commentary. This will initially be used to enable all UK residents age 18 and above access to a continuously updated directory listing of all readily-available investments within the SEIS, EIS, VCT and BPR marketplace together with full due diligence reports and product scoring. Subsequently the company intends to exploit the technology by developing 4 more sites that will offer similar facilities within the Pension, IFA, Fund Management and Secondary Market Equity Investment industries.

All of the Guru websites will be objective, independent, and uncompromised by payments from product/service providers and promoters, engendering the trust required to become the de-facto Go-To financial investment website for Investors and advisors alike.

Market Research carried out by CIDG shows that there are currently 1,383 IFA firms with 1,539 outlets that have 5,850 named professional individuals across the UK, providing advice on SEIS and EIS.

Given the complete lack of ‘real-time’ information and due diligence available to these individuals, it is apparent that their clients see only a very small percentage of the investments on offer. Notwithstanding that, the investment volume was still up from £545 million in 2010-11 to £1.4 billion year ending 31 March 2014.

UK Income Tax Collection

Although the highest rate of income tax (45%) only affects a small percentage of the UK’s 29.9 million taxpayers, it represents 29.7% of HMRC’s revenue from personal income.

Approximately 6,000 people in the UK pay tax on income over £2,000,000.

In total, 4,600,000 people pay the higher rate of tax (40%) with a further 343,000 paying the additional rate (45%) on taxable income over £150,000.

All of these individuals would be considered as HNWIs – i.e. 4.943 million people. However the CAIDG model is focussed on the 343,000 additional ratepayer’s and initially the 2% of these that have declared that they self-advise.

HMRC’s own data published in 2014 which showed that in 2012-2013, approximately 20,000 taxpayers invested a total of £881m via EIS, and a further 5,000 people allocated a total of £117m in SEIS projects.

CAIDG Site Content

Market research shows that there are approximately 100 VCTs, EIS Funds and Individual Seed or Enterprise Investment Schemes open at any given time. Unlike current information providers CAIDG does not charge a posting fee per project, instead it has adopted the Directory approach, whereby all market offers are included in a standard reporting entry format. By doing this this we ensure that the site is completely unbiased, objective and uncompromised.

CAIDG provides full technical reports on all publicly available projects. These are then independently scored by 4 professionals using industry accepted KPI’s (key performance indicators), at no cost to the promoter.

Unfortunately, (for them) all VN sponsored projects are not listed on the site under the single company SEIS or EIS investment categories as the Directors are aware that this could compromise the site.

For completeness CIDG does not allow:

Any form of online or off-line investment transaction

Any form of online linking to Investment providers/promoters via the portal

Any form of direct contact to investment providers/promoters via the portal

Any form of Client banking or investment transaction

Any form of ‘Advice’ save the ‘Opinion’ report published on the CAIDG Portal.

CAIDG subscribers fall into 2 categories:

  1. Free or Trial Users
  2. Paid individual subscribers.

CAIDG potential revenue streams consist of:

  1. Paid Commercial subscribers (Fund, Project Provider or Promoters)
  2. Fund, Project Provider or Promoters purchasing ‘multiple rights of replication’ allowances re reports produced by CAIDG
  3. Portal advertisers
  4. Investment Banks/Houses purchasing CAIDG branded technical reports on non CAIDG Listed products.

For further information please download our Brochure or IM.