IKROA

Smart Investments Market

Comment

Inspiration

A friend of mine is a partner of an investment firm Twogeneration (https://linktr.ee/Twogeneration), and I have recently joined as a customer. I have been enjoying the experience so far. I thought everyone in the world should have worldwide access to these kind of deals to improve their wealth. That's why I'm building IKROA.

What it does

It is a two sided market for investment funds and customers that are looking to invest. You can search and filter across multiple companies and deals (plans) and find the one best suited for you. Then you can invest (pay via rapyd collect APIs). I wanted to complete the disburse part as well, but didn't have enough time to do so.

For investment firms is a pain point to handle all customer cases, and move high amounts of money from one country to another, and also disbursing each and every payment, handling errors with each, etc.

ikroa.com solves the investment firms pain points while providing a nice experience to a customer in his investment journey.

How we built it

Techstack: Meteor, ClojureScript, Bootstrap 4, MDB Currently hosted on GCP App Engine

Challenges we ran into

First, finishing everything substantial in my free-time, was very hard as my day-job projects needed a lot of attention.

On regards to rapyd concepts, they where a bit hard to fully understand, but thanks to the impressive documentation I managed to sort everything out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I managed to sucessfully build this Meteor app with 99% ClojureScript code. I love JavaScript as a platform, but as a programming language not so much :). On paper sounded like an easy task, but were many configurations that were required so the ClojureScript generated code played well with Meteor's environment. Worked like a wonder in the end!

What we learned

Knowing Rapyd API is a real super power. I am a US citizen, but have lived 30 years of my life in Guatemala (I'm 32). Rapyd.net is the first real fintech I've seen that takes cross-border payments seriously, with government-issued currencies.

In third world countries we have very limited payment options, and I was pleasantly surprised there are locations here in Guatemala to pay with cash directly; that's crazy to think about, as not everyone here has access to credit nor debit cards.

What's next for IKROA

After completing the MVP (still using sandbox), I have contacted my friend at the investment firm and he's very interested and already suggesting changes.

Of course, the bulk disburse feature (work in progress) needs to be completed, as this is the most appealing feature for investment firms.

Support for all countries and all currencies (right now only the US and USD is supported).

There's some interest on making white labeled versions of IKROA for 1 firm only, in order to use the benefits of being able for customers to subscribe to investments, but don't compete with other investment firms. I'm considering having such possibility as well.

Finally, there are A LOT of challenges on regards to regulations for investment firms, and legal documents between customers and firms.

I want IKROA to be the intermediary between the customer and the firm, but at the end the customer is signing with the firm, not with IKROA. All complaints (pending payments, incomplete payments, etc) should be handled by the firm itself, not IKROA. That all takes a lot of effort and attorney hours, as there are a lot of legal matters that need to be taken care of to be safe :)

Built With

Share this project:

Updates