Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: My Digital Money CEO Guy Gotslak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To what extent did the consulting business help you in this new project?

Guy Gotslak: A lot. I was customer-focused. I wanted to get personalized services to our clients. We ended up getting acquired by a software company that does personalization where the idea is to help give personalized digital experiences. It can be on any channel. I just became passionate about being able to do that but still keep humans in the mix too.

Sramana Mitra: You stayed with the company that acquired you?

Guy Gotslak: Yes, for two years.

Sramana Mitra: The personalization software is being applied to financial services?

Guy Gotslak: Yes, we had a lot of banking clients where we tried to personalize the experience to what we call the segment of one. Instead of sending an email blast to a huge segment of customers, you have a segment of one where you figure out that customer’s preferred channel of communication and their affinities based on their buying patterns. You apply a lot of AI to drive the interactions that are both automated or on the phone.

You give people some personalized actions to verbalize with the client. That was the whole mission for banks. The way banks were working was pretty antiquated. We were trying to help them improve their bottom line and their customer engagement. A lot of money in banks comes from repeated business.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come to My Digital Money. What do you do?

Guy Gotslak: The company provides a training platform that allows people to buy and sell crypto in an IRA, which has huge tax advantages. We do cash as well. On top of that, we have a customer service team so you can talk to a human being. That human being will help you sign up and answer questions about crypto. We noticed that a lot of people are hesitant to invest in crypto because they were scared of it. They just want reassurance. It was important for us to have a US-based customer team that is knowledgeable.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you compete with?

Guy Gotslak: You can say that we compete with Coinbase and the big guys, but we also compete with other companies like Bitcoin IRA. There’s the whole idea of compound growth. You can look at Peter Thiel from PayPal as an example when he had an IRA that grew to $5 billion. He was able to do it because he had a high-growth asset in that IRA, which was PayPal. We believe that crypto is the same. It’s like investing in Google in 2005. We think offering IRA with crypto is a big opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this company off the ground?

Guy Gotslak: My business partner already had a relationship with our custodian. We were able to work with them to handle the IRA piece. We just started working on the product. We have some funding. We’re self-funded but still funded.

Sramana Mitra: You were self-funded because you had an exit before.

Guy Gotslak: Right. Through the investments, we were able to build the product and go to market.

Sramana Mitra: There’s no external funding?

Guy Gotslak: Not yet.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: My Digital Money CEO Guy Gotslak
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