Spotlight: Birchal’s declarations and consent bot

Birchal is an equity crowdfunding platform, created by the team who brought you Pozible.com. They make investing in some of the world’s most exciting startups simple and fast, and they use Josef to help them in that mission.

In this interview, Matt Vitale, Co-founder of Birchal, shares how they decide on the right processes to automate, and tips for firms wanting to try new things.

Can you tell us about what your declarations and consent bot does?

Prior to launching a crowdfunding campaign, we need to get declarations and consents from people that have been involved in preparing the offer document, including directors and senior managers. The bot helps us to get those consents and produce the required documents in an efficient way.

What are the impacts of using Josef to automate this process? Who does it help?

It has saved us a lot of time. It’s particularly valuable time that we’ve gotten back given the often frenetic pace when we’re opening a crowdfunding deal. And being able to empower people to prepare these declarations themselves has been a really great benefit.

How did you decide to automate this process?

We found that we were doing this task repeatedly and we were burning time just modifying templates. What it’s highlighted is that if you’re just modifying a template that you’re using regularly, you should just automate it and figure out who the most appropriate person is to be completing it is.

Birchal is creating another bot on Josef at the moment. How do you decide on the right use case?

We thought about how we can empower our customers to do things themselves more. 

We currently prepare a template offer document for every offer. This document advances the template that ASIC has provided in their regulatory guide, and includes additional guidance and things that we think are more useful for our customers. Everyone uses this document. 

Having a bot automatically provide customers with this will give them a good starting point: a base document that they can advance with their team and their advisers. And again, we formed the view that we’re wasting time by preparing this ourselves. It’s going to be much better for the bot to get the information from the source and produce the document. 

If you could give one piece of advice to a company starting to use automation to innovate, what would it be?

Make it a priority to think about how your process can be enhanced with technology. You’re wasting time otherwise. Setting aside the time to do it seems like an investment or like it’s taking away from your business as usual stuff, but actually, you’re better off in the long run. 

It’s an investment that will pay dividends. 

Josef and Birchal have worked together for some time now. What is Josef to you?

A very useful innovation and a team of nice people to deal with.

If you’re interested in using Josef to drive meaningful change in your firm, request a demo.