Walliance has updated its online real estate investment platform and, with the English version of its website, now accelerates on internationalization upon the return of the FUTURE: Proptech in London. The CEO Giacomo Bertoldi explains news and perspectives.

Why did you update the site? With which priorities?

At present, only by aiming for high quality, also in terms of usability, it is possible to attract more users, involving them in the real estate investment process. Therefore, a product update, both of software and of the user experience, was fundamental for Walliance.

What are the most important news?

In the project fiche, we have highlighted all the important information for users, both those specific and those concerning the reference market. In the Release WebApp, we’ve eliminated unnecessary features by adding others, designed it exactly as if it was a mobile app. The most significant innovation is certainly the English language release that opens the doors to foreign users. It is the first step to achieve our international growth goals.

For the English version of the site, it was not just a translation, was it?

Yes, exactly! In addition to the translation, we had to make changes on the structural side: personal notifications, transactional emails, interactions with chatbot, regulation, etc. It was also necessary to implement all the functions to simplify the registration and investments by users outside Italy. What are your international goals for 2018?

We aim to complete the process of internationalization from the regulatory point of view, in order to respect the time-to-market expected in early 2019. Fresh capital will allow us to increase our presence in the most strategic European countries. From the point of view of the projects, internationalization has already begun: we have identified investment opportunities in the United States, there will soon be other interesting locations. On the investor side, the goals are the same we have for the Italian market: average investment of + EUR 20k, HNWI customers.

What are the greatest difficulties?

The biggest problems are related to regulation. A single market with different regulations inevitably presents distortions that affect the activity of platforms like ours. The attempt at harmonization carried out by the European regulation on crowdfunding proposed by the European Commission does not help. The real problem is basically the maintenance of 4 licenses based on different regulations.

You just came back from FUTURE: PropTech, in London: how did it go? What opportunities did it open for Walliance?

As a main sponsor we had an important visibility and we found a great interest in Walliance: we hope that important collaborations will follow. This showcase on the European market has allowed us to put into practice the scalability of the business, trying to ride the interest of the foreign market towards real estate investments in Italy that is always alive. The 90% of FUTURE: Proptech’s exhibitors were companies that offer services of Virtual Reality and Data mapping, this gave us some interesting ideas also on blockchain, even if the theme still has unclear aspects.