Veteran director Alison Gerry has stepped down from the board of Sharesies after almost eight years helping the investment platform transform from a brash startup to part of the firmament in financial markets.
The boardroom reshuffle will see former Trade Me chief executive Jon Macdonald take up the chair, while Infratil chief financial officer Phillippa Harford joins the board, with 3EOs Brooke and Leighton Roberts and Sonya Willams rounding out the governance team.
Co-founders Richard Clark and Martyn Smith are also technical directors.
“I think it’s always hard to work out when it’s the right time to go, especially when you’re still loving doing what you’re doing,” Gerry said in an emailed statement. “I feel confident handing over the reins to a new chair to take this wonderful company on the next part of its journey.”
Gerry first joined the board of Sharesies in November 2017, about nine months after its incorporation when it evolved from a fintech accelerator programme sponsored by Kiwibank and run in tandem with Wellington’s CreativeHQ.
At the time, she was on the boards of Spark New Zealand, Vero Insurance and Infratil – which she now chairs – and had got to know the Sharesies team when she was a director of Kiwibank.
A bright spark
Back then, the platform had only been live for about five months and had attracted 9,400 clients who’d invested $6.8 million through the portal into a selection of managed and exchange-traded funds.
Brooke and Leighton Roberts and Williams said they were “incredibly grateful” to Gerry for agreeing to chair the board in 2017, with her experience having an enormous impact on the company.
“Over the past eight years, through challenges and successes, Ali has helped lead Sharesies to empowering Kiwis and Australians to grow their wealth and make a brighter future,” they said in a joint statement. “We will miss her around our group board table, but we are excited also to have independent director Jon Macdonald succeed Ali as chair and thrilled to welcome Phillippa Harford onto the Sharesies board.”
Sharesies now boasts more than 800,000 clients on both sides of the Tasman who’ve invested north of $9 billion across a range of stock and fund investments from New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Gerry said hitting positive cashflow – a key inflexion point for startups – was a personal goal when she joined the board.
“I’m also really pleased Sharesies has achieved significant revenue growth over the last few years and is in a strong position for further growth,” she said.
Sharesies branched out into KiwiSaver a couple of years ago and has built up $462 million of funds under management, offering self-selection options as investors get increasingly engaged with their long-term savings schemes. More recently it started preparing to offer cryptocurrencies through the platform.
Trading up
Macdonald joined the Sharesies board in 2020, having first got involved with the platform when Trade Me injected $4 million into the startup in 2018 for a 16% stake to help fund new product development and raise the firm’s profile, letting it more than double its staff of 14 back then.
Trade Me still owns almost 13% of the company, although since investing in Sharesies the online marketplace was taken private by Apax Partners in 2019 and is rumoured as a potential initial public offering candidate after refinancing about $2 billion of debt earlier this year. Macdonald was CEO of Trade Me through its 2011 IPO.
Sharesies raised $50 million in 2021, valuing it at $500 million, at the peak of the venture capital investment boom, with global venture firm Amplo – an early backer of US trading platform Robinhood – leading the transaction.
A global slowdown the following year as ultra-low interest rates rose rapidly to tame the sudden emergence of inflation gripping the world, upended tech valuations and Sharesies was knocked by the economic slowdown as market activity dried up, restructuring the business in 2023.
As reported in The Bottom Line on Dealmakers over the weekend, Pathfinder Asset Management was another early investor in Sharesies when it injected $460,000 into the startup in 2020. Its annual financial statements for its funds valued the stake at $2.5 million as at March 31, implying a valuation of about $360 million for Sharesies.
Pathfinder based its valuation on a price-to-sales multiple of nine-to-10 times, and adjusted for a liquidity discount of between 15% and 25%. That price-to-sales multiple compares to Robinhood’s 28 times, Charles Schwab’s 8.1 times and Tiger Broking parent UP Fintech’s 4.2 times.
Reporting by Paul McBeth. Image from Curious News.
Disclosure: Paul McBeth has had an active Sharesies account since January 2024.
