Deal Box: Pioneering The Digital Transformation Of Capital Markets

The financial services industry continues to be buffeted by radical changes from enterprising financial technology companies that are disrupting legacy services and encroaching upon long-established markets.

These game-changing FinTech companies – Rocket Dollar included – have raised the bar for consumers as well. Our customers are savvy retirement investors who demand better financial service offerings and increased access to a wider range of investment options.

Rocket Dollar recently partnered with San Diego-based Deal Box to provide our retirement investors with increased access to early-stage growth companies that offer greater growth potential and the ability to further diversify their retirement portfolios.

Pioneering The Digital Transformation Of Capital Markets

John Nance, president & chief investment officer of Deal Box, says the investment and asset management industry is in the midst of the largest transformational evolution in its entire history. These disruptive changes likely will become as pervasive to investing as the Internet and smartphone have become to modern technology and business.

Deal Box has two primary audiences: Investors and businesses seeking capital for growth. Historically, investors were limited to the deals that shuffled across their desks, and it could be difficult to find deals outside their geographical location or areas of expertise. Deal Box (and other crowdfunding platforms) has greatly expanded investor reach by eliminating geographical and other barriers. As a result, early-stage companies are now raising larger amounts of seed money from a bigger pool of investors.

“Our platform showcases deals,” Nance says. “Entrepreneurs are great at making their products, but oftentimes they aren’t as good at productizing their businesses – and that’s what’s needed to raise capital. Deal Box provides institutional-grade information on these companies so investors can easily perform due diligence at their fingertips and find more deals that meet their personal investment criteria and standards.”

Deal Box does all the back-end legwork for investors, such as meeting with company executives, reviewing business plans and other key aspects of due diligence that can consume countless hours. Its vetting process takes a minimum of six to eight weeks, and Deal Box then makes all that crucial information easily accessible through its web-based platform so that sophisticated institutional investors and accredited individual investors can review high-qualities deals from early-stage startups with a level of due diligence previously inaccessible to the public.

During initial capital raises, deals on the Deal Box platform are limited to SEC-accredited investors. However, as companies shift from seed and Series A rounds into later stages of growth, investment thresholds are lowered, allowing retail and retirement investors such as Rocket Dollar Self-Directed account holders the opportunity to jump in.

Increased Control, Portfolio Diversification and Opportunity for Growth

Despite historic highs in the public markets, returns actually have compressed, which has forced investors to scale further up the risk curve in their reach for yield, Nance says.

“Investors are taking more risk for less return,” he says. “When 2018 came to a close, the 20-year trailing returns on the S&P 500 were only 5.52 percent annually – if you went strictly S&P since 1998, your money would have made roughly 5.5 percent every year compounded. But if you go back another 20 years from 1979 to 1999, that number is greater than 17 percent compounded. There was a 20-year period where investors were getting approximately 3.2 times greater return on their money.”

Investing through corporate 401(k) IRA fund menus is pretty limited, he adds. Companies such as Rocket Dollar and Deal Box remove restrictions by providing greater control over qualified assets in ways that do not restrict them to valuations in the current market or fund menus that are chosen for them.

“By giving you full discretion over your qualified retirement assets, you can take greater control over your retirement investing,” Nance says. “Having a self-directed IRA enables investors and individuals to take control of their retirement assets. Rocket Dollar created the technology that gives them access to their qualified retirement capital, and Deal Box matches their demand for high-quality emerging deal flow with a supply of high-quality issuer companies.”

As an added caveat, Deal Box also invests in the companies offered on its platform. Having an initial stamp of approval and a check written from a reliable, trustworthy and transparent third-party organization helps validate the investment potential of these businesses.

“We seed-and-lead the issuer companies placed on our platform” Nance says. “We want to be first in the door and offer all our due diligence to other potential investors.”

Rocket Dollar account holders can learn more about Deal Box’s digital securities platform through its website, or they can schedule a call with Rocket Dollar’s team of experts to discuss this new avenue of retirement investing.