Welcome to the Cape Shapers Founder Series, where we sit down with founders of the incredible and innovative businesses we work with at Cape. Today we’re spotlighting Caleb Gibbins, the founder of Cache, an ‘Investing-as-a-Service platform’ that is transforming the way companies launch and operate fintech investment products.
In this interview, Caleb shares the story behind Cache, the company’s evolution to date and what’s next in 2022 (and beyond).
Who is Cache? Give us your elevator pitch.
“Cache is an Investing-as-a-service business. We launch and operate white-label investment products for our partners. So if you want to launch an investment product for your customers, you can come to us.
We can build, launch, operate and maintain the investment stack end-to-end so that you don't have to build a wealth management business in-house.
Our unique value proposition is that it would previously take about $1-2 million, and 12 to 18 months to build an investment business. Instead, we can help people get to market within about three to four months at a fraction of the cost. Plus, clients can benefit from our continual product development and new best-in-class feature releases to help their business scale.”
What’s your story?
“Before Cache, I was a financial services lawyer, working at MinterEllison to help launch and advise on ETFs and retail investment products.
I wanted to launch a new platform that filled the gap in the market for a hyper-liquid, low barrier-to-entry investment product that allowed people to invest with small amounts of money. Raiz was around, but virtually no other micro-investing products existed at the time.
Soon after we launched, it became clear that running a B2C business was really expensive and other Fintechs had approached us to help them launch products of their own. So we pivoted to become a platform that helps other businesses launch investment products.”
How did you arrive at Cache?
“When I was launching the first iteration of Cache, I had several founders asking me about the process of launching a micro-investing platform.
I’d advised a number of start-ups in the past about what tech they needed to build to make it happen. Quickly I realised that we could better help these founders (and make money) by sharing our own stack and supporting them as their service provider.
With that pivot came new product needs, like creating admin portals, customer support channels and being able to offer reporting capabilities to our partners.
It took about six months to build the MVP of our B2B solution, and we’ve been building out and expanding our capabilities ever since.”
What challenges has your sector faced recently?
“The past 12 months have had two very different periods for investment businesses.
Up until December 2021, the market was buoyant and positive, with high start-up valuations and a strong stock market.
But the last six months has seen a drop in asset valuations and a decline in marketing spending, as inflation rises and businesses sit tight on their cash until the stock-market stabilises.
For us at Cache, we're still growing month-on-month pretty rapidly, so our plans are to continue to grow (both the number of clients on our platform and the number of accounts on the platform).
We're just building for volume and to support our clients as they grow and I think that journey will continue in the same way as it did last year.”
How do customers handle volatility in the current economic climate?
“I'm a big believer in making regular investments with a long-term vision. If you can set up recurring investments into an account that earns a good rate of return over the long term, then you're doing pretty well.
Most of the products we launch are designed to help people start doing just that. While investing $100 once isn’t going to change your life today, it does set up good behaviours that can pay off in the long run.
Putting away a few hundred dollars a month for 10 or even 20 years can help you save up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That’s the behaviour change we want people to make, and opening a micro-investing account is the first step to getting them there.”
What’s next for Cache?
“Primarily, our focus is just to continue building out our capability in the Australian market for the next 12 to 18 months. We are the leader in micro-investing infrastructure and we want to solidify our position here.
We also want to bring more banks and traditional financial services companies into the market. I see the digital investing market as supporting 5 to 10 million accounts in Australia in the short to medium term, and we're only at 2 million now.
There's a huge opportunity ahead of us and we want to make sure that we build a platform that can scale to support this entire segment, so that's priority number one.
After that, there are questions about our next products, such as broking capabilities and even international expansion. We've got some plans in the works, but at this stage, it's pretty clear that the Australian digital investment space is where we need to be.”
What have you loved about using Cape?
“Before Cape, we were using another card issuer for our corporate cards and some of our expense management.
We jumped across to Cape because of the fantastic FX rates and no fees, as it allows us to pay overseas expenses like our AWS bill and other things without unnecessary costs.”
Random question: what is your favourite holiday destination and why?
“My favourite holiday destination is somewhere I haven't been before. I love to travel and I like going to countries that are different to Australia. South America is amazing, Southeast Asia is amazing, and I'd love to go to Africa - I haven't been there before.”
The wrap
And that’s a wrap! Big thanks to Caleb from Cache who joined us for the very first Cape Shapers Founder Series. Stick around as we continue to sit down and share the stories of the innovative business we have the pleasure to partner with here at Cape.
