Bizhare's "Equity Crowdfunding" Platform Initiative Encourages Indonesian Investment Interest

Term equity crowdfunding or crowdfunding has started to be discussed since the issuance of Financial Services Authority Regulation (POJK) Number 37/POJK.4/2018 concerning Crowdfunding Services Through Information Technology-Based Stock Offerings. In November 2019, OJK has also issued a permit to three startups who run a business using this concept. One of them is Bizhare, a business investment platform that focuses on helping small and medium businesses to get funding through share ownership.

It has been running since 2017, the platform, which graduated from the 1000 Startup Digital incubation program, has attracted 36 thousand investors, and distributed a total of 30 billion to around 27 businesses.

Founder and CEO Bizshare Heinrich Vincent said that their main target market is employees of productive age, elderly workers and students who are studying business.

"We created this platform with the aim of simplifying the concept of investing in society. Here we are trying to become a stock exchange for franchise and SMEs in Indonesia," he added.

Investment mechanism and secondary market scheme

The dividend distribution mechanism in this platform is quite transparent referring to the historical data of the issuer/o others as an illustration for investors to start investing their money, but past performance does not reflect future performance.

The profit-sharing value may vary depending on the realization of monthly profits from the business and the timeframe according to the initial agreement with the issuer and franchisor at the time of the initial public offering.

Bizshare also implements several stages in verifying incoming business. One of them is an in-depth analysis and credit scoring before a business can make an offer. All information obtained will be listed on the proposal for investors to study. After the investment occurred, the team did not let go while continuing to monitor business performance and contribute to the development of the existing business.

Currently, Bizhare has also collaborated with KSEI (Indonesian Central Securities Depository) as a form of seriousness to continue to serve the community and achieve Bizhare's main mission, which is to help more people become financially free.

As an investor on the Bizshare . platform, share ownership will be recorded and stored collectively at KSEI, just like a public company, in order to facilitate the sale of shares in the secondary market to other investors. Currently Bizshare is also developing features secondary market for investors, to be able to sell their shares. The shape is a kind of exchange with a concept bid offers.

"We are targeting launch This year. Because we are among the first to carry this concept. We have prepared several publishers to enter the secondary market as well," continued Heinrich.

A . pre-series monetization and plans

In terms of monetization, Bizhare charges a service fee of 5% of the total nominal invested in a business. Besides, there are management fee 5% of every business profit using full-service financial statement distribution and automatic business profit sharing on the Bizhare platform.

Previously, Bizshare was supported with seed funding from Plug and Play, GDILab, and Digitaraya. Currently, his team is in the midst of exploring with several VCs and corporations for pre-series A fundraising. The plan is to use the funds raised for expansion, technology and operational development, and the digitization of SMEs.

"We have a plan to prepare SMEs for funding through technology. We are currently in the discussion stage with several companies." businesses to work together in the business of digitizing the SME business," said Heinrich.

Currently, most of the businesses in Bizshare are franchise and SMEs, but his team said that they did not rule out the possibility to enter the startup realm in the future.

"We'll see market Indonesia is not ready for retail investors who want to invest in startups. So we are waiting for the momentum," concluded Heinrich.