Delphia – Converting investment into a positive sum game

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Technology Innovators Magazine Company: Delphia

Website: www.delphia.com

Management: Andrew Peek, CEO & Co-founder

Founded Year: 2018

Headquarters: Toronto, Ontario

Description: Delphia is building the world’s first investment strategy that anyone will be able to improve with their data.


Delphia – Converting investment into a positive sum game

A passionate entrepreneur, Andrew focuses on technology backed by experimentation, data, and the changing patterns in human behavior. He has held pivotal roles in several of Canada’s most notable startups, including FreshBooks and Shopify. He was also previously a partner at Jet Cooper. He continues to mentor and invest in Canadian entrepreneurs with an eye towards making the country one of the greatest places in the world to innovate. In an interview, he speaks on an array of topics. Excerpts:

Conception of Delphia

“We founded Delphia to create meaningful prosperity by re-distributing wealth to those whose data is creating economic value,” says Andrew. “It’s more than passion, though. We have the financial and technical expertise to pull this off as well. Our team is a combination of two research labs — one with proven skill in predicting consumer behavior, the other with a breakthrough way of predicting company fundamentals at scale. We’ve come together with a common purpose. One we hope will resonate with you.”

Delphia is building the world’s first investment strategy that anyone will be able to improve with their data. Delphia forecasts the growth and profitability for thousands of companies simultaneously through a series of machine learning models. “When Delphia’s model disagrees with the market, we adjust the weights of our diversified equity portfolio to reflect the confidence we have in our predictions.” Notes the entrepreneur that when he started the company, there was no way to truly take ownership of your data and use it to your advantage. There were some solutions that offered to pay you for your data, but nothing that aligned people to the true power of it. “We believe that power comes from aggregating everyone’s data together and using it to generate real world returns.”

The fintech world

Fintech is on an upward trend, observes Andrew. He says that this will lead to the emergence of new business models across the BFSI sector. However, with tremendous growth come challenges and risks. He urges fintechs to be mindful of the ever-changing regulatory conditions. With new financial assets come new forms of financial engineering. These can be exciting and present tremendous opportunity, but fintechs still need to interface with the letter of the law — and update their approach as the letters start to change.

Fintech industry — the way ahead

Andrew urges fintechs to keep an eye on the ease with which their customers can switch solutions. “Money wants to move freely. It wants to be liquid. If you want to attract capital, you can’t approach it with a stick — it needs to be a carrot.”

Delphia’s solutions

As an investment strategy provider, Delphia offers financial products and services that can be improved by the contributions of its customers. The company has built a massive technology stack that uses over 50 billion data points and runs more than 40 million active predictions at any given time, which is a significant amount of Machine Learning for making informed decisions about which stocks to buy and sell.

Leadership traits

“First and foremost, only employ people who you yourself would work for.” Noting that his team refers to him as the sun in colloquial terms, Andrew urges entrepreneurs to see themselves as bigger than their business. “You’re a creator and the business is but one expression of you. If you can make peace with the fact that everything we do in this lifetime will likely be forgotten (except by our children), everything will become a little lighter and a little more enjoyable. Failure is beautiful in the context of exploring the upper bound of your potential.”

The Success Mantra

“You will have a dramatically different outcome if you choose to play positive sum games over zero sum games. Finance is often zero sum. There is a winner and a loser on either end of a trade. If you can harness the competition that comes from zero sum thinking — and turn that into a bigger pie altogether — that’s how we evolve humans towards a brighter future in my opinion.”

 

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