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Zoe Financial Pitch Deck to Raise a $3m Seed

This is the Zoe Financial pitch deck used to raise a $3m seed round. The deal was announced on Sep 18, 2019.

About

Zoe can help you find a financial advisor that sees the world the way you do. We screen the experts to ensure that they will provide the client with the right advice in the right manner. Because financial help extends beyond just the numbers.

Curated matching: We understand that finding trusted financial advice is difficult, which is why we have handpicked financial advisors. Since our financial advisors operate independently, they are not tied or biased towards any particular family of funds, investment product or insurance company. They are held to the highest standards of care & are required to act in the best interests of their clients at all times.

Our core values are:

Integrity – talent is important, but having a strong moral compass is essential.
Client-focused – our top priority is to educate & empower our clients to make better financial decisions. We strive to deliver the best client experience in the industry.
Growth mindset – we strive to continuously grow professionally, intellectually and personally.
Innovation – we are redesigning the way personal finance is done, so originality and creativity are in our DNA.
Data-driven – at Zoe we make decisions that are data-driven and always strive for intellectual honesty.

Zoe founder and CEO Andres Garcia-Amaya, who previously served as an executive director at JPMorgan Asset Management, told Business Insider the startup takes on both due diligence for investors considering where to put their money, and marketing and business development for advisers and planners hoping to add new clients.

Since launching in February 2018, Zoe has signed up hundreds of clients and has a total of $150 million in investable assets, Garcia-Amaya said.

“If you ask any advisor in the US if they could pick one thing that they would focus on the business going forward, they would say ‘grow it,'” Garcia-Amaya said. “It’s the hardest thing for them.”

Garcia-Amaya spent more than a year vetting financial advisers and planners before going live. Zoe now has hundreds of financial advisers and planners on the network, which accepts 5% of applicants, he said.

Zoe lists fee-based independent financial advisers and planners that earn their revenues based on a percentage of the assets that they manage. The marketplace service in turn charges a percentage of that revenue, as opposed to a listing fee or fees for the number of client leads that it generates.

“We don’t get compensated for making a quick intro and a first date. We only get compensated if both sides meet and end up marrying each other,” Garcia-Amaya said. “Therefore, it really aligns ourselves with making sure the match is a really strong one.”

“It was really important to raise capital from investors that could actually be partners and help us,” Garcia-Amaya said. “For us it was really important to have people that had scaled business in the space and understand it.”

Raises

Zoe Financial Pitch Deck

Cover is fine. There is no point in sticking confidential on your deck though.

This isn’t how you want to make a slide. They just write the problem and then you have to read the whole slide to figure out what the problem is. They make 5 little points for two groups and what the actual problem is not entirely clear.

It’s really hard to actually notice that they have snuck in the client and advisor at the bottom.

They seem to thing two pictures of old dudes makes the slide useful. It doesn’t. Focus on the content. Focus on the point you want to make.

I personally use black for text everywhere and only use grey for points that don’t matter much. They write their main point in grey with a grey background.

Now, look at the points on each side. “Delightful profile”? Excuse me, who gives a shite? And they pick that as the key solution to advisors? It’s a bit bizarre.

Now the slide is about advisors, but it’s sort of randomly just stuck in the deck. It’s just not a good slide and their narrative is rubbish.

This market slide seems to be about clients but they decided they’re going to combine market size on it too, crammed on the right.

Their market sizing is moronic. Are you seriously telling me their targeted market opportunity is $85T. I call BS, that’s going to include ETFs which sure as shite clients don’t pay 1% fees on. But don’t worry about that, here’s a photo of a guy trying his best to give a smoldering look.

Most startups have no reason why now is the right timing, but that doesn’t stop founders from coming up with reasons why now.

Their logig is that people are generally more educated (so they need advisors?) and the advisor share of the market has tripled… in 15 years… I mean if that doesn’t get investors hot and heavy ready for boom boom sexy time, what will?

So they don’t think ETFs are competition? Pretty sure people have high trust in them because advisors and their lies don’t go anywhere near them and they literally passively track a market.

Then they recon “revenue sharing” is a good thing. Which is BS. Advisors get different fees for different products to shove down client throats. So sure, the model can generate more revenue, but it’s not to the benefit of clients.

What’s up with “customer exp.”. Is that experience, or expectation? What?

If you remove the image from the background you might stop and think “hm, this slide is crap, perhaps we should try harder?” This is why I don’t like getting designers to do slides. They cover up your crappy content.

Another rubbish slide. Investors want to see metrics or just, well anything more than what’s on this slide.

I presume they made this slide as a template to publicly share their deck which is ironic since how is the team a secret?

Again, why are they hiding who the investors are? No one cares.

Also, you absolutely should not input a whole slide on investors in your deck.

And the two men speak. Are they clients, because apparently, they have something to say. Only there are no names.

Are these milestones that they have achieved or ones they plan on, and if so when?

They have three numbers which implies to me that they are hiding something or have very little to show. Investors like charts. Well, I do anyway. You can get a sense of the trend that way.

I don’t know what is meant to be on this slide, but a chart is unlikely what should be here.

You only need a roadmap slide if you are really early stage, or if you are super product-focused and that’s what you are raising money for (mainly SaaS companies).

Well, they were scared to show the team before, but here is who I can only guess is the CEO?

I’m all for a closing slide, but do you think that this slide sells? Nah.

All in all this is a pretty crap deck. If there was no design and it was just text, you’d probably say “so that’s what you plan on doing in your deck, you’ve got a lot more work to do still”. The images cover up the total lack of work done.