Entrepreneurship can be an exciting but lonely experience. You start off with nothing and most likely with your peers thinking you’re chasing an impossible dream, or worse, doing nothing of worth. If you manage to prove your worth and build a successful business, you’ll also lose touch with those same peers because your concerns are quite different from theirs, and they most likely start to regard you as the lucky guy.

They say it’s lonely at the top, and that certainly applies to successful entrepreneurs. You don’t need to achieve great wealth or success to start to feel that. Even the mere fact of owning a business and being fully responsible for your and your family’s financial future (not to mention that of the employees who depend on your company)

Entrepreneurs’ Organization

EO is the only global network exclusively for entrepreneurs. EO helps leading entrepreneurs learn and grow through peer-to-peer learning, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and connections to experts.

Entrance to the EO requires you to have a business that generates more than a million dollars in revenue per year, and costs around $6000 to join. It’s aimed at entrepreneurs who are experienced and successful and certainly not at those just starting off on their journey,

Although it might seem a bit elitist, I think the requirements and high fees make sense. The success of the organization depends on its members sharing many of the same concerns and dilemmas, as well as providing useful contacts and advice to each other. It’s safe to say that a beginner entrepreneur will not have the same concerns and capacity to help others that a seasoned entrepreneur at the helm of a $1m and multiple-employee business will.

There are several events throughout the year, and you get subsidized rates to first-class hotels and tours as part of your membership. You’ll find entrepreneurs of all ages and industries in the EO, which means you will also widen your field of knowledge and be able to learn from other sectors that you were previously unfamiliar with or even unaware of.

[Read more…]

High street banks are being threatened by leaner fintech companies with better technology that provide a better service at a lower cost. At least we’ve heard that statement many times over the past few years.

Let’s see how that translates into a real life example.

Let’s say we need to convert $100,000 into euros. We’ll pitch a typical high street bank against two well-known currency conversion services: Currencyfair and Transferwise.

I picked two Maltese banks, HSBC and BOV. Here are their advertised rates:

Having checked all the rates, let’s have a look at the final results.

Here’s what each Maltese bank will give us in return for our USD:

• BOV: €87,734
• HSBC: €87,039

Amazingly, between the two leading banks in Malta, we see a difference of €700 for the same simple service. Pretty bewildering if you ask me. I believe that both banks also charge a fee, although I was unable to locate the pricing for currency conversions on their website.

Let’s move on to the fintechs:

• Currencyfair: €88,837
• Transferwise: €88,925

Note that Currencyfair improves on the BOV’s rate by €1,100, and Transferwise by €1,200. You must also keep in mind that I’ve seen banks that provide much worse conversion rates and extra fees for conversion. Even so, the differences between the fintechs and the Maltese banks are pretty impressive, and I, therefore, see it as a no-brainer to go for either Transferwise or Currencyfair for currency conversions.

Bonus: A Clever Hack using the Mintos platform

If I were to suggest an even better move, I would skip all the banks and currency conversion services and use Mintos for my currency conversion needs. Mintos is currently the best European P2P lending platform and I’ve been obtaining upwards of 10% returns per year on my investments there.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with our currency conversion case study.

The thing is, Mintos launched a foreign exchange service on their own platform. You can, therefore, deposit those $100,000 and convert them to euros there. At the time of writing, the rate employed by Mintos for USD to EUR conversions was 0.892818. They also charge a 0.7% fee.

• Mintos: €88,581

That’s by far better than the banks’ rates, and slightly worse than Transferwise and Currencyfair. However, once your money is on Mintos, why not invest it there? If you don’t want to park your money there as an investment for a long time, just let your money work for you for just one month, then use the secondary market to sell your loans. The secondary market on Mintos is highly liquid, just as an example I know an investor who sold $1m on the Mintos secondary market in just one day recently.

Keeping an average return rate of 10%, which is easily achieved at the moment on Mintos, after parking our newly converted USD to EUR on the platform for a month, we would be able to withdraw the following:

• Converted currency €88,581 + Returns of 1 month circa €885 = €89,466

That’s the best result of this currency conversion experiment. You could also keep some money invested if you like Mintos and withdraw the rest, or keep the whole amount invested and gain around €8-10,000 per year at the current interest rates.

What’s your take? Let me know in the comments section.