LOOKING OUT FOR THE SMALL INVESTOR

JAVIER VALVERDE IS ON A MISSION TO ADDRESS INCOME INEQUALITY BY MAKING WEALTH-BUILDING TOOLS MORE ACCESSIBLE

When he was 11, Javier Valverde(FIN '17) left his native Spain to spend five months with a host family in Dublin, where he planned to improve his English. Valverde already knew he wanted to follow his father into international finance, and he knew that speaking fluent English would give him a leg up. But his time in Ireland taught him more than just language skills.

"In Spain, I grew up in a bubble," Valverde said. "All I knew was how my friends and I lived. So it was a shock to spend time with a family that wasn't as lucky as us."

Although both host parents worked, the family lived from paycheck to paycheck, and could only afford two meals a day. "I went to bed hungry a lot of nights," he recalled. "For the first time, I saw that there are people who live that way, and it spurred my interest in income inequality."

Valverde hopes the fintech platform he founded as a Notre Dame undergraduate, Capital Pro, will give people such as his Irish hosts the tools to improve their money management skills. The site uses data analytics to provide savings and investment advice tailored to each individual's needs — reducing the cost of hiring a personal financial adviser without compromising the quality of the advice. "Investing can be hard for small investors, because most financial advisers won't handle accounts under $50,000," Valverde explained. "What we realized is we could help financial advisers offer their services to more people by translating their thinking into software."

The Capital Pro software, which functions on an adviser's website, is intended to answer investors' questions and seamlessly allocate their savings according to their goals and risk tolerance. Not only does the platform make financial advisers accessible to people with less than $50,000, it also works as a partner with the adviser, providing advanced analytics about clients, which enables more fruitful conversations and delivers better, more relevant advice.

To build the initial prototype, Valverde was mentored by Carl Ackermann, a Mendoza teaching professor of finance. He also enrolled in a basic computer programming class at Notre Dame and supplemented his classwork by outsourcing some parts of the design to India.

In 2016, Valverde entered the McCloskey Business Plan Competition and ended up winning the funding to participate in the Plug & Play Tech Center, a legendary startup accelerator in Silicon Valley responsible for launching numerous companies, most notably PayPal.

Valverde and his two business partners — including now-CEO Daniel Febres Cordero — spent summer 2017 in Silicon Valley turning their product into an actual business. They incorporated as a C-Corp and currently are in the process of raising a $500,000 seed round. They decided to focus on marketing their product to Latin American investors and banks. "Given our team's makeup, it was obvious that we had a competitive advantage there," Valverde said.

This fall, Valverde turned over the day-to-day running of the company to his two partners so that he could start a job at McKinsey & Company in Chicago. He remains involved in major strategic decisions. Valverde and his partners already are pitching the Capital Pro software to Latin American financial advisers and speaking at conference including Fintech Americas in Miami. They plan to open an office soon in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The venture also earned Valverde a significant personal accolade: Digital publisher OZY named him as one of its 2017 genius award winners, a distinction that carries a $10,000 cash prize as well as the opportunity to be featured on the OZY website (www.ozy.com/rising-stars/).

Valverde said his goal is to give everyone access to the same investment advice and opportunities that have always been available to wealthy families.

"It's not that people don't save, it's that they often don't invest their savings wisely for long-term compounding," he said. "A lot of the time, the money is in a savings account making almost zero interest, which means they're effectively leaving money on the table. The solution is to democratize good personalized investment advice so people can start investing smaller amounts earlier."