The biggest problem with equity crowdfunding and the simple solution

According to many sources, equity crowdfunding is revolutionizing investing. Thanks to the JOBS Act, private deals are much more accessible for a wider base of investors. Now these deals can be advertised publicly instead of only behind closed doors like in the past (thanks to Regulation D, Rule 506c which came from Title II of the JOBS Act). And soon non-accredited investors will be able to take advantage of the huge opportunity that equity crowdfunding provides when Title III is fully enacted in May of this year (keep an eye out for Rule 4(a)(6) deals).

 

Equity crowdfunding investment revenue volume has been doubling year over year and by some estimates will reach over $36B invested per year in 2020.

While the JOBS Act is making strides in solving the two huge problems of deal advertising and accessibility, they have completely ignored one of the biggest problems of private investing; fragmentation.

Historically, to invest in private deals you had to "know a guy" who would get you into the circle of investors. Now, you only have to look as far as the internet to access dealflow. Unfortunately, the explosive growth of equity crowdfunding has only made the fragmentation of deals worse.

Now (literally) hundreds of equity crowdfunding portals have popped up, offering a variety of deals from startup investments to real estate and alternative assets. While this new dealflow provide great opportunities for investors, they have to go to each and every portal and sign up, one-by-one, providing sensitive personal information. Then, even if that platform's deals aren't of interest, you start receiving endless deal announcement emails, most of which are totally irrelevant to the narrow scope of deals that each specific investor is interested in. It's reticent of the daily deals market 5 or 6 years ago when many of us signed up for Groupon, LivingSocial and countless other daily deal sites, only to become inundated with irrelevant (and annoying) deal alert emails.

The by-product of solving the advertising and accessibility problems has intensified the fragmentation problem. No one has time to comb through all of these portals and monitor dealflow.

If only equity crowdfunding (and other private) investing could be as easy as buying a publicly traded stock.

Lucky for investors, new companies are building tools to help address this issue of equity and debt crowdfunding deal fragmentation.

One tool that recently launched in the market is a mobile aggregator of equity and debt crowdfunding deals, called Access Invest.

Think of Access Invest as Kayak.com for equity crowdfunding. All the deals you could want, in one place.

With Access invest, investors can see hundreds of deals without needing to sign up for each and every platform.

Investors can filter for the asset classes they are most interested in and the mobile app's curation engine sends you deals that match your preferences via a simple Tinder-like interface.

Instead of searching endless for deals, Access Invest brings the deals to investors. And because of its analytics and customization system, not only can investors monitor deals from platforms and deal sources they are familiar with, but investors can also find new deals they never would have found elsewhere.

Access Invest is a deal discovery engine.

By using the app, investors build a curated list of deals and then make easily connect with deal sources to get questions answered. Since private investing is social by nature, investors can also share deals with friends and colleagues to get their opinions or join in making an investment.

Instead of tracking dozens of portals on your own, Access Invest lets investors discover new deals, track investments they are most interested in, share deals and curate investment flow so they only spend time of the types of deals that match their investment objectives.

There are other aggregators and apps that also focus on equity crowdfunding that are interesting to check out, but most have a narrow scope of deals while Access Invest has a variety of deals across many asset classes (from real estate to startups and beyond).

You can learn more about Access Invest at AccessInvest.com or by downloading the free app from the Apple Appstore.