Platform promotes community model to enhance content

The chairman of Snowball Finance Inc, an online social and trading platform, said its next step is to better enable its community to deliver more content.

The online community's content is generated by users and covers a broad range of stocks, asset classes and investment strategies, according to Simon Fang, chairman of Snowball Finance. It contrasts traditional research platforms, on which editorial teams provide insights.

Even though Snowball Finance has expanded its business to stock trading, a more profitable segment, Fang underlined the importance of further solidifying the user base.

"The core product of Snowball Finance is the community. The evolution of a community needs to be internally driven, while outside intervention is useless," he said.

"We will not go against the nature of the community just for the sake of overly rapid development."

Fang added the company will continue to maintain a laser focus on serving its online community this year, after attracting 13 million monthly active users last year.

Even in a bear market like that seen in 2017, Snowball Finance saw its users grow by 60 to 70 percent year-on-year, according to company CEO Li Nan.

Eight years after its establishment, the company attracted $120 million in its D round fundraising in 2018. Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, was among the investors.

Fang said the new round of financing will mainly be used for product research and development, as well as recruitment to bolster the company's community operation and trading system.

Snowball Finance's other main strategic priority is to build up its trading capabilities in different financial products, Fang said. A slew of public equity funds, as well as private investment funds, are available on the company's website.

To achieve that goal, the company has introduced algorithms to boost the efficiency of content distribution. The technology gives greater exposure to high-quality content and fuels users' enthusiasm to share their thoughts, Fang said.

Snowball Finance is partnering with Ant Financial to not only provide trading services, but an accompanying service covering the full investment life cycle, according to Hu Xiaodong, senior director at Ant Financial.

The collaboration will popularize financial services, as well as help young investors to establish correct financial management concepts and strengthen their risk prevention awareness, according to Hu.