Collective2 Feeds The 'Starved' Investing Landscape

The Benzinga Fintech Summit is an event for those interested in finance, entrepreneurship, capital markets, deal-making, networking and accelerating their business.

It's a chance to interact with and learn from founders, C-Suite institutional executives, leaders of the biggest and hottest fintech companies, brokerages, banks, quants, hedge funds and managing directors from VC funds about the future of financial technology through networking hours, exhibiting, panels, and keynote addresses.

To get you prepared for the event, Benzinga will profile each fintech company exhibiting. Want to get involved? Submit your company here.

For this installment, we spoke with Collective2 COO Rod Casilli (answers may have been edited for length and clarity).

Collective2

Benzinga: What does your company do? What unique problem does it solve?

Rod Casilli: Collective2 connects independent traders with investors through our online web platform. Great traders from around the world ask Collective2 to track their trading results in real-time. Other investors can “subscribe” to these traders, and can automatically follow their trades in their own brokerage account.

The investing landscape is starved for alpha and trade ideas in a world where the vast majority of money is now either indexed directly or in index like tracking products. Collective2 provides retail investors access to true “alternative” investments.

BZ: Who are your customers?

Casilli: We have a two-sided marketplace so our customers are made up of Trade Leaders, those managing portfolios through submitting trade signals, and followers or investors that subscribe to the trades. We refer to the C2 model as peer-to-peer trade sharing. C2 users come from all backgrounds, experience levels and geographies.

BZ: How long have you been in business?

Casilli: Founded in 2001, Collective2 has grown to over 100,000 users tracking over 5000 active strategies. Over $75 million of investor capital is linked to strategies on the Collective2 platform.

BZ: Where are you located?

Casilli: Collective2 is a privately-held company based in Westchester County, about 30 miles outside New York City. It employs and collaborates with programmers, companies and corporate partners in many countries around the world

BZ: Who is your company's leadership? What kind of experience do they have?

Casilli: Collective2 was founded by Matthew Klein. Previously, Matthew founded Release Software Corporation and TechPlanet, Inc. Both were venture-capital funded start-ups in Silicon Valley.

When not coding and leading C2, Klein has written and published several novels.

BZ: Anything else Benzinga should know about your company?

Casilli: We recently started a podcast where we interview top-performing traders from the platform. The site is completely free to sign-up and use to browse full statistics and details of all trading strategies. C2 pays out $100,000s of dollars each year to top-earning strategy managers on the platform.

If you’re looking for cool fintech startups and access to top financial institutions, and are sick of attending stuffy corporate conferences, the Benzinga Fintech Summit is the event for you. Visit www.bzsummit.com for more details.

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