[The Institute for Innovation Development recently talked with Peter Hans, CEO and Director of Harvest Exchange Corporation, a digital distribution and behavioral data platform that uses machine learning technology to enable financial firms to compliantly reach a targeted, investment-focused audience at scale. Harvest seems to go beyond traditional media spend outlets because it is a FinTech company at its core and recently won an award from Alt Credit Intelligence for Best Distribution platform.]
Hortz: What distinguishes your crowd sourced investment research platform Harvest Exchange from competing sites?
Hans: Harvest is the world’s fastest growing investor network. We focus tirelessly on delivering a service that best aligns incentives across asset managers, institutional investors, financial planners and retail investors. This is our key differentiator and the reason behind the success we’ve achieved.
We don’t have a single editor or media person on staff, and we don’t care what type of content is contributed. Our algorithms prioritize who the insight comes from, and our machine learning engine filters out the noise and curates the most relevant investment content to the most relevant investor audience. We’re in the business of using our software to compliantly help investors discover and engage.
Hortz: How are you specifically using technology to add value and solve problems and goals for your clients?
Hans: We are a technology company, so everything we do and every value we provide is a result of our proprietary software and data analytics. Our software allows the most highly regulated firms to distribute their expertise to the audience most relevant to them. It allows that audience to access everything from high-value publicly available content to secure, individual communications and investor presentations. Our machine learning engine warehouses millions of investor interactions every week to exponentially provide more value to asset managers, investors and anyone else who simply wants to access smarter investment content without the garbage.
Hortz: Tell us about your second engagement platform Vosterra. How did you design the technology behind that platform differently? Who was this built for?
Hans: Vosterra, Latin for ‘your land’, is a Harvest product that was spawned from consistent feedback and demand. We built Harvest Exchange to optimize investor content marketing and discovery, but the problem of consistent, transparent and effective ongoing engagement with existing contacts remained. With Vosterra we built in a number of security and privacy configurations allowing our clients to fully customize a private portal most suited for their needs. It offers secure cutting edge client/prospect communication tools, which are white labeled, to streamline communications, supported by powerful engagement analytics.
Vosterra is built for any financial organization that wants to develop and strengthen their relationships with their clients and prospects, be it retail customers or other advisors, while also effectively addressing workflow, compliance and security.
Hortz: As a FinTech company, how do you see the marketing and distribution needs of financial services differently?