Can an AI named Rose and the wisdom of the crowd make investing a piece of cake?

To find out we caught up with Rupert Barksfield, Co-Founder and COO of Pynk – the people-powered investment platform aiming to use ‘Crowd Wisdom’ and AI to make investing easier, safer and more accessible for everyone, everywhere.

Here’s our chat, we’re sure you’ll find it fascinating – we did! 

Can you explain how Pynk works?

So, Pynk is, as we term it, ‘people-powered investment’. Essentially, we use ‘crowd wisdom’ from people all over the world, put that through our AI system, and then that gives us a trading signal in order for us to trade our funds.

We pay all the users who contribute into that system with shares of the fund – and then, obviously, the investors who put money into that fund benefit from that global knowledge base, and get a better return because of it.

What exactly is ‘Crowd Wisdom?’

Crowd Wisdom is really interesting. On the app you can predict the value of Bitcoin tomorrow, so that’s the very simple, basic level of use, but you can use Crowd Wisdom for all sorts of things.

In fact, the US government, and many other governments around the world, use Crowd Wisdom to predict world events. So, for example, Crowd Wisdom was used to predict whether or not Donald Trump was going to get into office – and the crowd voted that he definitely was. The crowd in that case wasn’t just US voters, though it would have included some; it was just general people from around the world. They were able to predict the outcome of that election before it happened – in fact, months and months before it happened.

Can you tell us about Rose, your AI?

So, yeah, she’s an interesting character – she doesn’t talk very much but she’s very useful! A lot of people think of Pynk as ‘just’ a Crowd Wisdom platform, but that’s really not what we are – its only one of three aspects of Pynk. The reason we have this ‘Y’ in our logo is because you’ve got these three pillars.

Pillar one is the crowd. The crowd predict on an asset and tell us if it’s going to go high or low tomorrow – right now we just do it for 24 hours, but in the future we’re going to be doing it for the much, much longer term.

The second pillar of Pynk is our AI, and that’s Rose. So, what Rose does is she looks at individual performance history for individual users. Because, one thing people are always saying to us is “but the crowd is wrong, right? So, how can the crowd be better than an expert?” And, the fact of the matter is, they are probably largely right. As in, on a given day in a bull market, the crowd are taking a position that would probably be a bad idea to follow.

But, what Rose does is to look for the patterns that other algorithms or individuals might not notice. She will look at an individual user layer, so she might look at your profile for example, and notice that you’re very good at making predictions at 6pm on a Thursday. Rose will pick that out, and then whenever we come to making a trade at 6pm on a Thursday, she’ll weight your opinion higher than someone else who she knows is very bad at predicting at that specific time. She looks for these nuances based on the time of day, the market conditions, and the individual user prediction history, and then that’s what we extrapolate from.

Then we come to the third pillar of Pynk, which is arguably the most important. We have a team of experts in-house, who are ex-traders, crowd enthusiasts, or ‘crowd understanders’ – let’s put it that way. They look at what the crowd says, look at what Rose says, and consider their own technical analysis of what the market is doing. If all three of those match, we trade. But, if any one of those doesn’t match, we don’t trade.

So, all three of those have to align, and that allows us to be 65% accurate whenever we’re making a trade. To give you an example, if all three of those match and it says that Bitcoin is going long tomorrow, we go long on Bitcoin tomorrow. We know, with pretty high certainty, where we’ve got to be in the market, where we’ve got to exit the market – and that’s really the sharp edge to our blade.

How does Pynk address financial exclusion?

The way that we look at it, and the reason we’re called Pynk actually, is that regardless of your wealth, your race, the country you come from, we’re all pink on the inside.

So, the idea is that our product should be open and accessible to everybody –when it comes to financial inclusion, we allow everybody in the world to participate in our crowd, and we have to work through those regulations in each individual jurisdiction. For example, in the states, we know we can’t give our users there a share in the fund, because it would be considered a security, and we would be committing securities fraud in the eyes of the SEC. We can, however, pay them in dollars for their time and participation, and that’s essentially what we do – because we need to have a diverse global audience, and we need to have people from inside the United States in order for our system to work.

Are regulators giving you a headache?

Yes and no. We believe that financial services needs to be a regulated industry, because as 2016/17 showed us, when you have unregulated financial products people will exploit them – and, unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in crypto and gave us a really bad name. Despite the fact that we believe that all the financial services industry move towards being blockchain or crypto based.

Predominantly we believe there have to be regulations, but they have to be done in the right way – and I think that’s where the authorities are struggling. So, we’re regulated in the UK under the FCA, and that has been a struggle for us, to work out how we build that vehicle – to allow our investors to come in and invest into Pynk.

But, ultimately, especially here in the UK, the regulators have been more concerned about Brexit. I think in the US they’ve been more concerned about what Trump’s doing next. In Europe they’ve been more concerned about how the union is working and operating. So, it’s very difficult to pass through new regulations for new products – ultimately, has it been giving us a headache? Yes, but we’ve been able to work through to the best outcome.

What is your future vision for Pynk?

Ten of fifteen years from now we’d really like to have turned Pynk into a decentralised, semi-autonomous organisation, more specifically something halfway between fully decentralised and fully centralised organisation – essentially decentralised but with a governing body.

We want to be able to provide a savings account for anyone in the world – one where you just put money in, it appreciates, you take money out, and you go and spend it. And, it’s that easy access opportunity, helping everybody – it doesn’t matter if you’re putting just a few cents into it, it’s still going to be doing what it needs to do, and it’s still returning a high amount and feel like a pretty safe system.

What are your predictions for blockchain, AI and emerging technology in general?

Blockchain is just going to be there and it’s going to work, and we’re not going to worry too much about it in the future – that’s ultimately where we’re going to end up.

With regards to the financial services industry though, I think there’s going to be this period of a certain amount of turmoil – and I think that’s going to be driven by our next recession. During that recession I think that a lot of people are going to be turning to alternative products. And, I think that’s really our big opportunity right there; to demonstrate that cryptography and blockchain can work in an environment where there’s a lot of frustration and worry and angst – and, as we drive out of that recession, it will be these newer products that are helping us.

That’s my personal belief. Obviously I don’t want another recession, but it’s going to happen anyway, and it’s going to be big and impact everybody unfortunately, so all we can do is just hold on and wait and see.

What is the best way to start investing with Pynk?

The best way is the easiest and involves zero cost. Become part of the crowd.

Start predicting through our app, get to understand how to be part of the crowd, and collaborate through the Telegram groups and the other communities that we’ve got online – just be part of the community, that’s the easiest way to get started. Then, once you understand things, start putting a little bit of cash in – you can do it through the app because we’re opening up to retail investors in November, so it’s a really exciting time.

Wow… mind officially blown! What an awesome fusion of the latest technology with the very oldest tech network – our collective brains. As the AI gets smarter and has access to more data, we imagine things are going to get even more interesting. Absolutely fascinating stuff there, and we’ll definitely be following developments at Pynk!

In the meantime it’s a huge ‘thank you’ to Rupert for taking time from his busy schedule to chat with us, and we recommend you check out Pynk for yourself at https://pynk.io

Please note this interview reflects the opinion of the interviewee and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited.

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