Interview with Marco Scioli, co-founder of Starting Finance, the biggest Italian community for finance enthusiasts under 30.
Young people tend to think of the financial sector as something not suited for their age. Changing such biases is Starting Finance’s goal, that is, making newer generations more involved with a sector that heavily shapes our future. Starting Finance aims to spread at an educational level, which consists in Information, Training and Gamification.
Starting Finance informs: the platform publishes daily multimedia content to get young people acquainted with finance.
Starting Finance Trains: young people enter the workforce via Masterclasses taught by bank managers and corporations.
Starting Finance Gamifies: an upcoming app will help young people invest without any real-life risk.
Startingfinance.com is a rich web portal in blog-form, and it is divided into:
News – daily news about finance and economy (more than 200 monthly articles)
Finance courses – beginner to advanced level
Community – a space where young people get to perform practical activities and interact through specific Clubs created by University associations.
Let’s hear from Marco Scioli himself about this innovative training project!
Hello, Marco. How would you describe Starting Finance to a young person via, let’s say, a Tweet?
I would describe it as the landmark for economy and finance for the youth in Italy.
How and when was Starting Finance born?
Four years ago, me and my associate Edoardo Di Lella – both finance enthusiasts – realized how little Italians knew about this topic. Moreover, it was hard for people who had our same passion to find a true landmark that would help us share our views. So, that’s when Starting Finance began.
How long did it take you to kickstart the project?
15 months. We became a startup company, and after growing our follower base we were able to create our Starting Finance Clubs. Today there are 32 of them, and they operate in the most important Faculties of Economics in Italy. Our master plan is to increase the knowledge linked to finances in our country with a sustainable and scalable business model.
Is your vision for Starting Finance finally taking form? What are your plans to succeed?
The initial idea was completely different from what we’re doing now: in the first year, Edoardo and I were working on a stock market simulator where users could compete against each other. But then we realized that giving people an education on the subject beforehand was key. Therefore, the Starting Finance of today was born.
Our future project will close the circle: our stock market simulator app for iOS and Android will be out in October. For us, the way to educate people is through playing, gaining experience with the market and learning from our mistakes.
Was the feedback from the target audience positive or negative?
Absolutely positive. We created our company’s first social media profiles three years ago to show our investors the growth of our community, and now we have more than 350.000 people who consume our economics- and finance-themed content daily.
Did you perhaps choose crowdfunding as a means to launch your project?
The project was immediately picked by Fabio Piccioli, asset manager for Banca Finnat. He helped us right away with raising capital, and we had the chance of joining his network. To this day we raised more than 1 million Euro, and for the last round we got involved with the English Private Equity.
How is financial education doing in Italy nowadays?
It’s still a very slow process, I’m afraid. Now, even the government started investing in financial education. As for us, we keep on doing our part by educating people as much as possible about this topic. In order to do so, we’ve also been working with many institutions in our country, such as Feduf, Consob and the Ministry of Economics and Finance.
Credits:
https://www.startingfinance.com/
https://corporate.startingfinance.com/