Ala Presenti, Co-Founder and Head of Finance and Administration, Moniflo
I’m Ala Presenti, co-founder of Moniflo. My active role in the company for the moment is Head of Finance and Administration, and I’m also in charge of the ESG strategies.
Moniflo is an investment platform for sustainable investment funds. We aim to directly connect asset managers with retail investors without any intermediation. Our goal is to open the world of sustainable investment funds and make them accessible and affordable to anyone who cares about their profit and about their wallet as much as they care about their planet.
What differentiates us from other players in the market at this stage is that we are the first company in Luxembourg regulated by the CSSF, the financial regulator of Luxembourg, to provide digital custody on blockchain for retail securities.
We are active in the traditional financial industry, but by employing blockchain technology, we take traditional investment funds and we tokenize them. This helps us to keep the digital records of custody on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology makes this more transparent and secure, as well as more affordable.
Traditionally, custody is held by a bank and there is a cost associated with the custody, for the securities. By using the blockchain, we pay only the gas fee, which is a very small cost comparatively, [and pass the savings to our clients.] This is one of the benefits of using tokenized securities.
We are proud to say that in February 2024, we officially launched our product. We are live in Luxembourg, and in Germany, and are able to serve all European residents and EEA residents.
We offer a very simple product. For the moment, we open only actively managed mutual funds. We also offer two distinct ESG or sustainability investing strategies. Notably, the first strategy focuses on impact investing, allowing our users to align their portfolio with the UN SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals]. The second strategy is focused on value-based screening, where users can go and filter out [undesirable investment types] to make sure that their investments match their values.
Eric Falk, Co-Founder, Head of IT, Moniflo
I’m Eric Falk, co-founder and head of IT at Moniflo.
The requirements we had when we were looking for a digital assets platform was that it must implement top-notch security. That was one aspect.
In addition, we were looking for a solution that was easy to integrate into our workflows. Since we are targeting a B2C market, we needed to highly automate all of our IT processes and workflows
The specific Fireblocks features we are using are the Tokenization Engine [to issue the tokenised UCITS available to Moniflo users.] And the second is the multi-party computing, signing mechanism, [which we use as a governance mechanism. By assigning signing roles to the fund issuers, the holding of the asset is verified on-chain through MPC and governed by the Fireblocks Policy Engine.]
And, finally, we use Fireblocks to solve several issues that you can find in more classical Web3, crypto type of companies or workflows. We’re able to avoid a single point of failure with multi-party computation and the distribution of cryptographic keys that Fireblocks offers.
We also appreciate the business continuity that Fireblocks offers, which is important in cases where an individual loses a private key or or it gets lost in some other way.
Another innovation that we are able to bring to the market, thanks to Fireblocks, is that we can deliver our custody services while bringing full transparency to all the different actors in the chain. So, the end users will have a clear understanding of how much assets they hold by consulting our custody wallets, but also the various partners with whom we subscribe to funds. They can attest that we do indeed hold those funds that those funds have been paid for. Obviously, the regulators have a very clear view on all of this because everything is out in the open on the blockchain.
