SwissBorg CEO Cyrus Fazel: ‘We enable everyone to enjoy the world of decentralized finance, regardless of their investment interests’

28.04.2021 07:00, Isabelle Mitchell

Lausanne-based SwissBorg, a Venture Leader Fintech 2020, aims to shape a new era of wealth management: An international team of finance and technology experts is dedicated to decentralizing and democratizing wealth management by making it fun, fair, and community-centric. This approach includes a token, a straightforward and trustworthy investment approach, two apps, and a strong social media presence. We checked on the status of the SwissBorg ecosystem with founder and CEO Cyrus Fazel, one of the masterminds behind the fintech startup that aims to change the decentralized world.

Cyrus Fazel and Anthony Lesoismier-Geniaux founded SwissBorg in 2017. The two entrepreneurs have a banking and asset management background and wanted to reinvent the banking industry. SwissBorg’s transparent strategy combines technology and decentralization into a holistic approach to create a technology-driven digital-asset ecosystem based on three pillars: information, entertainment, and investment.  

The SwissBorg token (CHSB), which comes with its own yield program that revolutionizes earning on digital cryptos, is a critical element of the investment experience on SwissBorg. Entertainment and information are provided by SwissBorg experts who share their knowledge in blogs, social media, and YouTube videos to ensure that community members understand how they can manage their digital assets. All of this gets topped off with a gamified approach to learning about bitcoin: The SwissBorg Crypto Challenge app (formerly known as SwissBorg Community App) allows users to predict the price of Bitcoin. Since the app launched in 2019, almost 200,000 players from 110 countries have made more than 5.5 million forecasts.

Cyrus, in March 2021, more than 280,000 people used the SwissBorg Wealth app, and your company had USD 1 billion of assets under management. SwissBorg’s CHSB token reached an all-time high of USD 1.50, resulting in SwissBorg reaching unicorn status. How would you describe the last year?  
This last year has been an incredible journey with many highs and lows. Generally speaking, it has been a rollercoaster for many startups in the crypto space. Since the start of FYQ1, we’re thrilled to have added over 200,000 users to our main product, the SwissBorg app. This increase happened over the span of a week, leaving us with more support requests than we could handle. As a result, we tripled the size of our support team and doubled the size of our employees, totaling 150 employees. Our current team size and structure allow us to maintain customer satisfaction and move closer to our dream of democratizing wealth management at large. In 2021, we reached a USD 1 billion market capitalization—a dream I had only hoped to make a reality until it actually happened. None of these achievements would be possible without the support of our loyal community and hardworking employees.

One element that differentiates SwissBorg from its competition is the community that you just mentioned. What makes the SwissBorg community so unique?
At SwissBorg, we foster spaces for our community members to communicate topics pertaining SwissBorg and CHSB. Since the very beginning, our intent has been to ensure that the users, the community members, of our product have a say in the overall direction. Our community is connected through our DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] and social media initiatives, where we have over 50K followers on Twitter, 22.3K followers on Instagram, 16.6K subscribers to our YouTube channel, 16K subscribers Reddit, and various community communication channels on Discord and Telegram. Additionally, SwissBorg’s token, CHSB, and its performance are what keeps the community in alignment. The better the token performs, and the more utilities it acquires, the better and the stronger the community’s alignment.

Having such a strong community and being so visible on social media must give you a lot of energy. How does it affect the pressure to succeed?
Our goal is to be as transparent as possible, and being connected to our community via social media enables that form of transparency. It’s definitely a source of energy, and I see it as a double-edged sword. I monitor feedback and comments and often, they keep me up at night. As of now, I view the community in two different categorizations: The individuals who’ve been with us since the ICO and those who’ve just joined. Our lasting members know the name of our game and trust us in knowing good product development takes time. However, our new members have an unrealistic expectation in thinking everything should happen in a snap. To the new members, we remind them that Rome wasn’t built in a day. What we do is wealth management, and it takes time and patience to build wealth.

I have never invested in crypto assets. Why should I download the SwissBorg Wealth app and become a member of the SwissBorg community?      
The SwissBorg app is the easiest way to onboard, buy and sell digital assets, and get exposure to the world of decentralized finance at large. It’s great for both crypto newcomers and for those who’ve been in the space for a while. The app is secure, licensed, and our ethics are unmatched. The ease of use, the security, and the low fees are the main reasons. We are as easy to use as Coinbase—but we are better and do it with ethics. Coinbase is a regular fintech, however, and it does not give back to the community. We give everything back to the SwissBorg community. We are like the “Fairtrade” of crypto. Of course, you can buy Bitcoin almost anywhere, but are you really helping decentralization? With Coinbase, you might, but we also know that all the money goes back to the regular investors. And what we want to do is to help everyone and not just the super investors.

The SwissBorg Wealth app comes with a safety net program that helps limit risks. Could you explain how it works?
One of the most significant movements out of crypto is decentralized finance and NFTs [non-fungible tokens]. Decentralized finance is all about how to replace the banking industry in multiple ways. The SwissBorg app has a safety net program for our Premium and Genesis Premium users, where we insure up to  USD 10 million. We built a technology that enables people to invest in automatic modes. With that, there is a certain risk of these decentralized lending and borrowing pools. The general safety net program for all users covers USD 15 million, and in total, we have USD 300 million; therefore, up to 5% can be reimbursed. The safety net will ensure that users are paid back whatever is lost within the decentralized pools.

Have you had to use the safety net program? And if so, what has been the feedback from the community?
We’ve used the safety net on one occasion so far. The funds within a liquidity pool were lost, and we had to reimburse around USD 89K. There was no reaction from the community as we aim to keep the user experience seamless. The community knows about the program, and they expect it to work. 

SwissBorg helps people make smart investment decisions with automated crypto asset analysis that is powered by artificial intelligence: The CyBorg Predictor is a machine learning algorithm that forecasts an asset’s movement over the next 24 hours by combining massive amounts of historical data and technical indicators. Do you leave everything to machines, or is there a human element?
If you look at a bank, typically, there are three to five portfolio managers and analysts in a wealth management team. Today, a large percentage of tech people are building new products, while a few create investment universes. There are a lot of limiting factors, such as security auditing. Who wants to do this daily when you can just create the technology to do it for you? We believe that people are investors, but very few people are traders. If you are a trader for a long time, it is a highly complex life with many ups and downs, so we rely more on technology. 
At SwissBorg, there are about 150 employees, and we all have different competencies. We’re creating an investment universe with human talent; from there, we develop the Smart Engine with our data to move closer to our goal. Today, our different oracles benefit from the best rates for our community when buying and selling different digital assets or by investing them in different decentralized pools.

Where will SwissBorg be in 2026?
We want to be the number one decentralized crypto wealth management ecosystem in Europe. Our ambition at SwissBorg is to offer an increasing amount of wealth management services and to build new decentralized protocols. We want to offer tailor-made investment experiences: How Spotify creates the best listening experiences, that’s how we want to create the best investing experience by way of the best mandates for our users. SwissBorg in 2020 was more for traders and in 2021 is more for investors. We hope that in a few years from now, we can be for everyone. Everyone will be able to enjoy the world of decentralized finance through our products, regardless of their investment interests. That is democratization. How are we achieving this? By making it secure, easy, and fun.