3 Questions with Gene Khalyapin of Perfiqt

FintekNews is pleased to offer our weekly feature column “3 Questions”. Each week, we feature a thought leader within a unique sector of fintech and ask them to answer just 3 questions for our audience in their vernacular. This week, we’d like to introduce you to Gene Khalyapin, Founder & CEO of Perfiqt, artificial intelligence that uses gamification to simplify advanced financial planning to help millions of people make smarter financial decisions and live more fulfilling lives.

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How did you personally become involved in fintech?

I’ve always been in finance and technology, building powerful algorithms and financial models for more than a decade. My work on Perfiqt started when a financial advisor asked me a simple question “What car can I afford?”. Normally, a detailed answer would take hours of advanced financial planning, so he was looking for ways to automate the process. But that was impossible - it was way too complex.I saw that many great advisors in this situation chose not to compromise the quality of the service. Instead they limited the number of clients, prioritizing the wealthier ones. The remaining gap was quickly filled with sales people for mutual fund companies. Somehow they were also called “advisors”. Then came the “robo-advisors”. Both these groups focused just on the sales. They flooded the media with the blanket recommendation to “save more, save early, invest”, regardless of clients’ actual needs. That’s when we came up with the idea for Perfiqt: instead of advice, we would give people easy access to unbiased information. They could make smarter decisions and we could empower them to stand up for themselves against financial abuse: an informed person is much harder to trick!

What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?

We found a way to compress hours of advanced financial planning into minutes of fun and engaging process. Now it’s so simple that anybody can use it. We can help millions of people answer any financial question personally. This has never been possible before!

But the big picture of what we do is even more impressive. By helping people answer their financial questions we are addressing the fundamental need that has been forcing people to visit a branch or consult an advisor for years. Now many won’t have to do it: Perfiqt is simple, fast, unbiased and it fits into your pocket! For some clients who need it, we can even add fee-based fiduciary finance professionals. The same ultra-efficient Perfiqt platform would help them easily provide highest-quality personal service to millions. Just think of the impact this would have on the current well-established processes in the industry. With such a comprehensive life planning tool, we could eventually go further and help people with other aspects of their lives, such as Real Estate, Taxes, Estate, Travel, etc. Our technology opens up many amazing opportunities to help people.

What do you believe the next major innovation in financial technology will be and why?

Comprehensive consumer-facing FinTech solutions that would consolidate financial planning, lending, credit, investing and other services. This could be a real game changing product. Most of these tools exist in silos and eventually it makes sense for them to merge. For example, you don’t need to enter your income, expense and address every time you need a mortgage or insurance or investment. A comprehensive on-line tool would proactively monitor your whole financial situation – debts, credit score, banking/investment accounts, travel plans, etc.- and alert you to any possible improvements you could make. You can just show the tool the direction you are going by building your life plan and let it find the most efficient way to get there. Some account-aggregation products are testing this, but their basic transactional data analytics lacks the engagement, which is the key component here.

And I would love to see such a tool finally offer basic investment services for free. That would instantly take out one of the biggest biases in the industry: “save more & invest” advice will no longer be a blanket recommendation for all. This is actually very doable. The cost of investing is quickly falling, so a consolidated tool with many revenue streams could easily absorb it. The “robo-advisors’ curse” – the sky-high Customer Acquisition Costs – would be less of an issue because of the tool’s much greater appeal beyond just investment automation. The future of personal finance is coming and it could be Perfiqt!

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Gene Khalypin is an entrepreneur, finance professional and writer. Prior to working on Perfiqt.com, Gene spent a decade in finance in New York and founded several businesses.