PROFILE: Connie Bloem is trading for the masses

Connie Bloem says ordinary people can get involved in trading and is using technology to show them how.

In 2019 Bloem founded Netherlands-based Mesh.Trade with Andries Brink, CEO of the 42Markets Group, a specialist fintech group focused on building and supporting capital markets technology platforms for investment banks and central banks.

The pair have long experience in the financial business and realised it is “intrinsically broken”. Global markets function, says Bloem, “but it takes so long and costs so much to conclude any trade”. She says the middle men who mediate the trades “create unnecessary waste”.

A sophisticated financial instrument has layers of service providers, distributors, brokers, custodians, depositories, compliance officers, registries, exchanges, banks, tax advisers and lawyers. Each charges a fee for facilitating a trade between buyers and sellers. The capital market has long operated on old, inflexible, expensive technology and many manual processes that make it an industry ripe for modernisation, says Bloem.

She says Mesh can accommodate any financial asset — from multibillion-dollar trade finance packages to institutional bonds, from exchange traded funds to exchange traded notes and unit trusts, even simple listed stocks and cryptocurrencies, and a wide range of traditionally illiquid alternative financial assets.

She says Mesh opens the financial markets to any investor, from the CFO of a financial institution looking to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars into a high-yield instrument, to a single mother sitting at her laptop looking to invest a few hundred rand.

Bloem, a graduate of the University of Pretoria, started her career at Accenture and in 2016 became a business analyst at IT services and consulting firm Andile Solutions. They implemented big treasury and trade systems within the banks. Treasury services concentrate and invest client funds, offer solutions for trade finance and logistics, and protect, value, clear, and maintain investor and broker-dealer portfolios. For a bank, this is a source of risk-free income.

“It was just a love affair from the start with anything technology related,” says Bloem. “The appearance of bitcoin in 2012 may also have influenced me to a large extent. My friends and I started dabbling quite early on, just because it was fascinating.”

Bloem was comfortable with technology and “enjoyed checking things out”. Blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions, never frightened her. She was intrigued by the concept, the technology, the decentralisation and the freedom that it promised.  “I had a feeling that [blockchain] will be big, and when we started seeing the secondary chains coming through, like ethereum, and people started building projects around it, I knew it wasn’t just a buzzword.”

Bloem’s husband, Hendri Breedt, who landed a job in Paris, works in alternative energy at a firm in Europe. She jokingly describes the relationship as one saving the banks while the other saves the planet.

Passionate about processes and “fixing things”, Bloem saw the potential of blockchain and wanted to work in the business. “I’d thought about some of the earlier companies, where we’d done some arbitrage trading but nothing stuck until we started Mesh.”

Part of a difficult job is to create simplicity out of complexity, she says. “How can I explain this to someone without intimidating them, that will make them feel like this is something they can understand, contribute to and find interesting?”

A lot of people think that investment is just this one lucky strike, says Bloem. Imagine living in a world where you could see companies like Apple coming up and then invest in them.

“Blockchain makes everything easier to use. It makes things more transparent, and it makes things less complex. In its essence, it gives you a mechanism to see who owns what, and who did what, without anything being corrupted.”

Blockchain fundamentally takes away all barriers to entry because it removes intermediary services that redirect from the centre of the markets. “Keeping you away from the action, the place where all the big boys play and function, to give you a place to transact with your R10, where someone else transacts with their R10bn.”

Mesh.Trade provides infrastructure for the entire business and because of its underlying technologies, there is capital to be raised.

She says much becomes possible and the layers of intermediaries mentioned earlier, who just take money off the table, are no longer a hindrance. “You suddenly have a route to market where you don’t have to go through a broker or one of the 20 intermediaries; you can play directly at the centre of the capital markets and that is just so exciting,” says Bloem.