By the end of March, the Belgrade Stock Exchange will offer a “crowdfunding” platform to the Serbian market, a kind of stock exchange for financing start-ups, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in cooperation with one of the leading platform of its kind in the world.
Director of the Belgrade Stock Exchange, Sinisa Krneta, said for the Beta Agency that the goal of this business move is that young innovative companies and beginners would be able to get funds for further growth and development.
“We are on the verge of becoming a leader in Serbia in assisting companies in the early stages of development. By the end of March, the Belgrade Stock Exchange should become the official partner for the Serbian market, to the one of the global leaders in the provision of crowdfunding services, which connects the start-up companies, i.e. companies that are in the early stages of development, with investors who want to invest their money in the new ideas”, Krneta said, who, due to the respect of the contract, did not want to indicate the name of the partner from abroad.
As he explained, the Belgrade Stock Exchange will represent a “kind of informational point and catalyst which would enable start-ups, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, for which conventional financing approaches are inaccessible, to obtain the necessary funds”.
Moreover, he reminded that at the moment, most of the Serbian financial market is taken over by banks which due to their exposure to the strict regulation, everywhere in the world, are unable to meet the needs of financing start-ups and small businesses.
“The Belgrade Stock Exchange intends to bridge that gap. Innovative companies will be able to, under certain conditions, compete on the platform with their business concept for the investor funds, where, depending on their assessment, they will collect the necessary capital”, said the director of the Belgrade Stock Exchange.
He pointed out that the new platform will provide a new channel of investment in the country.
“We would like to contribute to important mission for our society, that start-ups stay in the country and that they can raise the capital that is crucial for their growth and development, in a relatively simple and inexpensive way, but without need to move to more developed countries”, Krneta said, stating that it will also help young people to register their intellectual property over products and services in Serbia, not in other countries.
He also reminded that most of the good ideas have failed due to unavailability of adequate financing models for the early period of their business, stating that the publicly shown statistics show that only one of the ten start-ups in the business remains.
“The main advantage of this model, which will be introduced in Serbia through the Belgrade Stock Exchange, in comparison with hundreds of similar platforms in the world, would be the possibility for the investors to gain proportional participation in ownership in such companies instead of awards and similar collaterals”, Krneta stated.
Furthermore, business ideas from vast fields would be represented on platform so that investors from abroad and Serbia would be invited to invest.
This form of crowd funding is already well known in the world. Current available data show that there are more than a thousand “crowdfunding” platforms present in the world and among the best-known ones are the Kickstarter, the Crowd Berlin, the IndieGoGo, the Kiva, the Microventures.
“Crowdfunding” market have become one of the fastest growing markets in the world. According to the Word Bank’s evaluation from 2015, “crowdfunding” market is about to have the traffic of approximately 100 billions of dollars by the year of 2020.
The perfect example of necessity of such type of financing is the Croatian market, on which, as Krneta stated, more than a year ago “crowdfunding” platform was established, thus enabling development of advanced companies from IT sector to manufacture of food and beverages.
Recently, Zagreb’s brewery “Medvedgrad”, after a quarter century of work, have decided to look for funds for expansion of the production, on crowdfunding platform of the Zagreb Stock Exchange. Thus, in 10 days, previously mentioned brewery managed to collect more than one million euros from 292 investors from 26 different countries.
Source: http://rs.n1info.com/a361709/Biznis/Beogradska-berza-crowdfunding.html