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Anyway, let's go ahead and move on to the next guest from Wizest? Go ahead and reveal yourself. Am I speaking with William?

I am speaking. Yes. This is William from Wizest.

Excellent. It's a pleasure to meet you. If you want to go ahead and introduce yourself and your company and tell us about what you guys do.

Absolutely. So I'm so excited to be talking to PLUGHITZ. Again, we spoke last year at this event. And Wizest is an investment trading platform, a next-generation investment trading platform that is trying to make it as easy to invest in the stock market as it is to play fantasy football. And I am William J. Littlefield, the second President and CTO of Wizest.

Thank you very much. Very nice intro there. So what do you got to show us today?

Well, today, I would just love to tell you a little bit more about how we have developed our software since speaking to you last time. I'd love to tell you a little about the product. So essentially, what Wizest is a product that allows you to invest in the stock market, similar to Robin Hood but the way it works with Wizest is you sign up for our trading platform and instead of having to pick stocks, bonds, and ETFs by yourself, instead of having to learn about crypto and pick crypto by yourself, we have experts on our platform that we match you with based on your investment preferences. So maybe you're interested in investing in renewables, minority-owned businesses. We organize financial experts into leaderboards that you can then choose to invest with and so instead of having to manage a complicated Financial Dashboard, you can manage your team just like you would if you're playing fantasy football.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that definitely. That definitely sounds like a good market to be in right now.

The market is exploding.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, the cryptocurrency market has absolutely exploded, just like he said. And I’ve definitely would have loved an advisor at some point instead of learning on my own.

So no doubt. And you know, there's plenty of people out there that you know, as much as they are passionate about financial literacy, passionate about crypto, there are other folks who are really passionate about what they do for work. People that work in medicine, or doctors, lawyers, engineers, and as much as they know that investing is a key part of their financial future, not everyone has the time, or the interest, necessarily. Maybe you're raising a family, maybe you just are passionate about your own thing. And so why invest by yourself in those spaces, when you can invest with somebody who's doing what you're doing, where crypto is their full-time, job, their full-time expertise and we're just trying to connect you with that financial expertise, which is normally just controlled by the 1%. So we're really trying to democratize access to the sort of strategies and experts that are used in high-net-worth individuals.

Absolutely. I mean, this makes a lot of sense. You know it's hard to find solid information on what to invest in, what coins are just means, or what might actually have some value in the long run, or in the short term, or something like that. And being advised of what taxes are involved, or what, what you're obligated to pay into, or take from, or whatever the all of the questions, all of the ins and outs. It's nice that you guys seem to have a service to kind of advise you on where to go, based on your preferences. Now, are these preferences things that you set, like as you're creating your profile, for example?

That's exactly right. So there are a couple of different ways that we add preferences to your profile. You nailed it on the head there. When you first registered for the platform. Of course, we ask you, first and foremost, what sort of sectors you might be interested in, what kind of portfolios you might be interested in, maybe you're interested in a retirement portfolio, or some other kind of time horizon. We also have Robo portfolios on the platform, really, we think of Wizest as a platform that allows you to invest with different kinds of financial advisors. To our knowledge, we're the only platform where you can invest with both the human advisor and robot advisor at the very same time. But to get back to your question about those preferences, we also know that a lot of people are in vet are interested in investing with people that are maybe from their alma mater, maybe people that are in the same community, people that may be aligned with their same political values. So it's not necessarily just based on what sorts of portfolios but you also want to invest with people that you believe in.

Sure. Okay. Yeah. Now, I think that's fantastic. You know, if you have a cause, or something like that, that you would like to invest in, it's good that you guys also go into that realm as well and not just stick to investing in cryptocurrency. It sounds like you guys have kind of woven a net, of good advice for just investing overall. Is that the limit of what you guys do?

So right now, the platform currently supports primarily trading activities. But it's a lot more exciting than that. That's a great question. So in addition to investing with financial experts, the moment that you have allocated money to an expert that you like, you will also have all of their posts in your activity feed. And so the way Wizest works is once you've invested with a financial expert, we curate all of their trades, as well as all of their commentary on the financial markets into a single financial news feed for you. And this was actually mentioned or praised several times in Forbes this year We are very proud of the feature. Maybe that'll be in the show notes. But, yeah, so, you're not just investing on the platform, you're also learning from the experts you invest in just like you would if you follow these experts on Twitter, on Reddit. So we put that all in one place for you. We also have different resources for financial literacy and the wisdom section of the platform. It's called wisdom because we're Wizest. And last but not least, of course, we're providing you financial news from other important popular outlets like Reuters, and Bloomberg, all in a single place.

Very nice. I like it. This all sounds very solid. I'm just gonna ask you one pretty simple question, really, to kind of top this off, what got you into all of this?

I have a bit of a yellow brick road as an entrepreneur but the most important, I guess, part of this story is just that I personally had a background working as a senior engineer at visa before joining this project. And I was certainly familiar with the frustration that so many people feel going about investing today, there are so many FinTech apps available, right? I mean, the universe is just so crowded by these apps like Robin Hood, or Coinbase. You don't necessarily solve the problem of not necessarily feeling like you know what to buy, or what to sell. What good is it if I get free trades if I just don't necessarily feel confident picking stocks by myself? Sure. The other problem is that if you don't meet a certain capital requirement, if you walked down to say, J.P. Morgan Chase, they were who I banked with when I was in college, so you go to college? So you go to investable assets and if you say no, they say come back in 10 years. So we want to open up that, that sort of opportunity digitally, to more people that wanted to get started investing, but didn't feel like they had the tools.

Right, exactly. That's, that's wonderful. Any tool that is here to not just help you along the way but actually teach you along the way to make good decisions based on what you-. A very good service you have going on. And is it currently available?

Absolutely. So that's the biggest change from the last time we talked to PLUGHITZ. Last time we were telling you guys at CES about the idea of Wizest, we had just really started our closed beta which was a free simulator version of the platform. Since then, we've happily obtained SEC regulatory approval, and also conducted an integration to a custodian broker-dealer of Robin Hood and now we are actually transitioning our closed beta product to production at the beginning of this year, probably by the end of January 2022 here.

Very nice.

You can go ahead and head to our website and we have a waitlist sign up for you to get onboarded ASAP.

What's the website?

That would be wizest.com, W-I-Z-E-S-T.com slash sign up 2022.

Fantastic. I always love to run into someone that we've interviewed before from previous years and see where the progression has gone and I'm glad to hear that you guys, you guys have a lot of momentum from the sounds of it. So I hope to see more. I hope we get to see you guys in the future CES-es and I hope it gets. I hope it continues to grow.

Me too. Thank you so much.

Of course

I think we're all praying that this pandemic will end and we'll have a cool return to CES in 2023.

Absolutely. Thank you very much for your time, all of the information. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy the rest of your show and please stay safe. All right?

You too. Cheers.

All right. Well, that was great.

TPN CES 2022 coverage is executive produced by Michele Mendez. Technical Directors are Kurt Corless and Adam Barker. Associate producers are Nancy Ertz and Maurice McCoy. Interviews are edited by Jo Mini. Hosts are Marlo Anderson, Todd Cochrane, Scott Ertz, Christopher Jordan, Daniele Mendez, and Allante Sparks. Las Vegas studio provided by HC Productions. Remote studio provided by PLUGHITZ Productions. This has been Tech Podcasts Network Production, copyright 2022.