PBWS Event: An Interview with Jacqui Pretty from Swissborg

Disclaimer: This interview was conducted in collaboration with SwissBorg and does not constitute investment advice. Do your own research and only invest the money you can afford to lose.

Jacqui Pretty – Chief Marketing Officer at SwissBorg

We met with Jacqui Pretty, SwissBorg’s marketing manager, during her visit to the Paris Blockchain Week Summit to talk about this dazzling success and to the various projects underway at SwissBorg.

What specifically brought Swissborg to this event?

Swissborg has a very large French user base, over 170 000 users. It’s the reason why French was the first language we translated our app to, because we understand the importance of making investment decisions in your own language.

Our team also has several French members like our founder Cyrus Fazel who grew up in France or our co-founder Anthony Lesoismier-Geniaux who is French, which means the team has many ties in France. 

Moreover, it’s also one of the big crypto conferences in Europe so it made a lot of sense.

Were the people in the audience of Salon de la Crypto mainly French?

The audience has been varied, ranging from other crypto organizations that are here to network and make connections, as well as retail investors – including SwissBorg community members who have stopped by to say hi at our booth. Both groups – organizations and investors – are very international.

What are your main goals coming here in Paris?

A big reason is to connect with our French community, which has been supporting SwissBorg since our ICO in 2017. The other reason is to bring more awareness to SwissBorg as a brand to help us achieve mass adoption in crypto. 

SwissBorg was created in 2017. Five years is a very long time in the cryptosphere. What has changed the most during this period?

When we had our ICO in 2017, the crypto market was booming, with both Bitcoin and Ether at all-time highs (for the time). We raised the equivalent of 50 million francs in crypto assets, and then everything crashed. We went from these heights to the crypto winter, which was when our team was building the SwissBorg app. 

In 2022, we are facing another market environment – there was a bull run in 2021, which saw SwissBorg become a unicorn with our token hitting 1 dollar and then 1,5 dollars, leading to a one billion valuation. 

For product growth, we launched our app in March 2020 with less than a hundred users and now it’s over 620 000 users. 

What are the core values at SwissBorg?

A couple of big ones are accessibility and transparency. 

We are very community-oriented and the only way we’re going to democratize wealth management is if crypto is accessible to everyone.
Transparency is also really important to us. It’s important that users see exactly how much they pay in terms of fees, we’re very clear about that. We publish monthly reports, so they know exactly what’s going on with our yearly program. We’re also testing and experimenting and building things as fast as possible and learning from what we built. 

Recently was released the Smart Send feature on the SwissBorg app. Can you tell us about it?

Indeed, it’s a very convenient feature that enables any user of the SwissBorg app to send crypto to other users without paying gas fees; there are also no delays and no borders between the 115 countries we represent. All users need is a phone number to make the transfer. Then if the people who receive the assets don’t have the app, they’ll have to get it to get the money.  

So, on one hand it’s great for existing community members because they can share crypto very easily but it’s also great to grow the community because people will have to download the app to get their crypto. I tied it with my husband who is not into crypto, I sent him some CHSB so all he had to do was to get the app. He now has crypto.

Last year, SwissBorg became a unicorn. Did that “unofficial diploma” change anything in terms of business, growth, numbers?

It obviously brought a lot of joy to the community, but it also triggered exponential growth last year. Because CHSB is an altcoin, is not available on many exchanges and yet investors saw this token mooning so they need to get the SwissBorg app to take part in CHSB’s growth and ecosystem.

Can you give me some words about SwissBorg business development for the next weeks or months apart from the peer-to-peer?

Peer-to-peer payments are obviously going to be huge because they increase the virality of the app. In terms of geographic expansion, we’re focusing on the Swiss-German market. With the three languages we can now reach all of Switzerland but also Germany, Austria, Benelux, France…We’re focusing on these areas around Switzerland. 

The next big release coming up will be thematics. Thematics are like an ETF or stock index for crypto, where investors can invest in a bundle of assets in a single transaction, instead of picking and choosing individual tokens. These bundles will be automatically rebalanced to maintain diversification, and the assets will be grouped based on themes, like sustainability or green crypto, which means you can invest directly in what you believe in.

We’re also working on revamping our Smart Yield wallet, with custom yield solutions where users will be able to choose the level of risk they want to make and the level of return for that risk. So someone who is conservative could choose to take a lower yield, such as 5% per year, but know that their assets are safe. Someone who’s more of a risk taker could earn a yield of 40%, but would be choosing a higher-risk option.

How do you see the future of the world’s finance? Is a merger between TradFi and DeFi inevitable?

I think it has to happen, because a merger is the first stage before the transition to complete DeFi. I don’t think you can jump directly from one to the other without merging the two because there are so many people that we need to bring from one world to the other and that’s too hard to do without a bridge. One of the things SwissBorg is providing is that bridge, because our app is a centralized solution for crypto investing, but features like our Smart Yield wallets connect to DeFi platforms to generate yields.

What will it take to get global crypto adoption? 

Accessibility is the key because crypto is still not accessible for many people. First, it’s difficult to learn how different wallet solutions and different platforms work. Two, there is this high risk because if you lose your private keys you can lose your funds with no way to recover them. That combination of the technical complexity with risk means a lot of people shy away because they don’t have the time, or the desire to take the time to learn about this. And those who might be interested, they see the risk and say “It’s not for me”. So having solutions where we have that bridge to make things accessible will help crypto reach mass adoption.