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Alan Pock has spent over ten years in finance and fintech. He first founded the software company Gettick, then bought Tržiště Hypoték (Mortgage Marketplace) as a struggling project at the time, reworked its business model and scaled it into the second-largest Czech mortgage platform, which he eventually sold successfully. Along the way he picked up experience in the US too, including on fintech and startup programmes right in Silicon Valley.
In April 2021, together with Vít Strnad, Filip Suk and Dominik Vávra, he launched Investown, which today ranks among the most prominent Czech crowdfunding platforms. It allows people to invest in property projects from as little as 500 CZK and is used by more than 135,000 people, which helped the company take second place in the FinTech category of the Zlatá koruna awards in 2024. At Investown, Alan focuses mainly on strategic development and investor relations.
Alan, Investown lets people invest in property projects from as little as 500 crowns. Do you remember the first reaction you got when you pitched that figure to investors or partners?
Most people told us it couldn’t work, that investments that small would never pay for themselves. They were right, of course – with one small catch. If we weren’t a technology company, it wouldn’t work. But we built technology that makes it possible. We’ve had to invest hundreds of millions of crowns in it, and we’re still not done. It’s an ongoing process, but we haven’t given up.
Building an investment platform into a community of more than 135,000 people doesn’t happen by accident. When did you first realise Investown had become more than just a product, that it was a real community?
The first strong moment like that came in 2022, when we ran our first livestream for investors. I half expected nobody would care and I’d be talking to myself. In the end it was a real success, hundreds of people joined and asked some genuinely interesting questions. The second such moment was our first in-person meetup with investors. Once you have personal contact with your customers, it really hits home that real people are using your product, that they like it and find it useful. That’s a great feeling.
You founded and sold Tržiště Hypoték yourself before Investown came along. What did you take from that sale into how you build customer relationships today?
First, let me set the record straight: I didn’t found Tržiště Hypoték. I bought it, reworked the business model to make it viable, then scaled it up and sold it.
In finance, your name is all you have. You have to do the work as conscientiously as possible. Even if it doesn’t make you rich in the short term, it always pays off in the long run.
Property investment used to be the domain of people with plenty of capital and experience. How does the customer experience change when you open that world up to people investing for the very first time?
We built Investown mainly for people who don’t have a lot of capital, or who don’t want the hassle of managing it themselves, so that literally anyone can invest in property and gradually build a financial cushion for the future. When you’re investing 500 CZK a month, it really is a long game.
A large part of our investor base genuinely sets aside a small amount every month and grows it that way. You just have to accept it’s more of a marathon than a sprint, and the bigger returns only come gradually as the portfolio grows.
Where does Investown draw the line today between what AI and digitalisation can handle for the customer, and what has to stay with a real person?
We mainly use AI at Investown to automate internal processes. Repetitive tasks that eat up a huge amount of time and energy collectively are handled by machines. Where it makes sense, we build our own custom tools for our specific needs. For example, we’ve built a tool for our internal legal team that saves us time and the licence fees we’d otherwise pay for a tool that still wouldn’t do everything we need. We’ve also built an AI agent for customer care that answers user questions. That said, people still appreciate contact with a real person more, so the AI agent often starts the conversation but one of our colleagues takes over from there.
Money is a sensitive subject. How do you build trust in a product where the customer sends real money based on data they can’t fully verify themselves?
In the early days, high returns helped us a lot. Projects were offering returns of around 10 to 11% a year, which was genuinely a lot. If you consider that the average savings account promised 5% at its peak and offers at most 3% today, an investment product with such a high return, which also regularly pays out real money, was bound to catch the attention of people looking to grow their savings.
Two other factors also helped us build trust. Early on, we secured seed investment from Česká spořitelna’s Seed Starter programme. The second factor is our licence from the Czech National Bank. We’re a regulated entity, so we have to follow a lot of rules and be completely transparent about everything.
Things are simpler for us today because we have real results behind us. Of the 10.7 billion CZK invested, 40% has been returned to investors, which comes to 4.3 billion in real terms. And we’ve earned investors more than 1.2 billion CZK in returns.
Regular meetups with investors are more the exception than the rule among financial platforms. What does personal contact with customers give you that no dashboard ever could?
For me, meeting investors is a great way to tell them, first of all, what’s going on at the company, because we know from experience that they really do care. It’s also how we gather feedback.
We meet investors who’ve reached Premium 3 and Premium 4 membership. Those are people who invest at least 500,000 CZK with us alone. Most of them also invest elsewhere, so they’ve got real money spread across different investments, they’re experienced investors and experienced users of various platforms. It’s a genuinely varied group, from very young people earning good money in IT, for example, to older people who might already be retired and for whom investing generates a nice, steady passive income.
For them, these meetups are a real benefit, so they enjoy attending, they’ve got plenty of questions about the projects and how the company runs, and of course they bring a lot of ideas about what they’d like to see in the app and what’s missing. Some investors come along regularly, so I already know quite a few of them personally. In a fast-moving online world, it’s a great way to stay connected with customers.
Has investor feedback ever fundamentally changed the direction Investown took?
We haven’t fundamentally changed direction based on feedback so far, but in development we often prioritise the features investors actively ask for. At the end of the day, user satisfaction matters most to us.
Regulation and security are a must in the financial sector. How do you combine strict rule-following with a customer experience that doesn’t feel bureaucratic?
Yes, we do have to follow genuinely strict rules. We try to speak to investors in plain language wherever we can, and keep the strictly legal wording tucked away in the Terms and Conditions, while our marketing communication stays as light and approachable as a non-bank financial institution can get away with.
As for processes, things like registering in the app, identity verification and the investor questionnaire are mandatory steps that can’t be skipped. What we can do is make them as simple as possible. So we’ve introduced Bank iD, for instance, which speeds up the whole registration process, and users can then log into the app using biometrics.
We’re also required to report results daily, so all the figures you see on our website are up to date. We try to present them clearly, in a visually appealing way, so anyone can get their bearings straight away and immediately see, for example, how much money has been invested through the platform, how much investors are earning in returns, or how many projects are currently in debt recovery.
If you had to name one thing Investown does differently in CX compared with most Czech financial companies, what would it be?
With us, an investor can see straight away exactly how much their investment is earning them: their average return, exactly how much money they’ve made in returns, how their whole portfolio has performed over the entire time they’ve been investing. What’s more, the money investors earn isn’t just virtual points on a screen, it’s real money they can reinvest immediately or transfer to their account and use as passive income. That’s what makes Investown unique.
As founder and CEO, you’re responsible for customer satisfaction, growth and community all at once. Which of those is personally hardest for you to keep in balance?
Growth simply goes hand in hand with customer satisfaction and a growing community. It’s all one connected system. Our data shows people have a lot of spare money they’d like to invest, partly driven by rising property prices in the Czech Republic and the cost of mortgages. Fewer and fewer people can afford their own home or an investment property, so investing in property-backed loans is a great alternative.
Our job is to connect these people with investment opportunities, which means making sure there are enough entrepreneurs out there looking for financing. Then everyone’s happy, because investors’ savings earn them money, and that naturally brings in more investors. Good old word of mouth applies here: every satisfied investor tells their friends about it.
Which book, podcast, conference or figure in CX has inspired you most recently?
Generally, I’m really into everything to do with AI. My colleagues also recently won Bloomreach’s Loomi Connect AI Hackathon with an AI agent called Silent Watch, which can identify inactive customers and nudge them back into activity. Partly thanks to that, I’m heading to LA in September to speak at the Edge Summit conference about how we connect Bloomreach and AI in our business. I’m really looking forward to it, I think it’ll be the biggest dose of inspiration and knowledge I’ve had in a long time.
