Investment management platform Bloqhouse automates 'one to many' payments through partnership with OPP

Bloqhouse provides an investment management platform that connects fund managers, lenders and crowdfunding platforms with investors. Any company raising and investing market capital can easily use Bloqhouse to set up a digital process that is fully compliant with laws and regulations. As an innovative scale-up, Bloqhouse continuously works to optimise its platform. For instance, it was also looking for a smart way to automate 'one to many' payments. For this, the company works together with platform specialist Online Payment Platform (OPP).

With an approachable cloud-based platform that allows investors to easily register with fund managers and other investment platforms, as well as go through the necessary checks, Bloqhouse aims to make investing more accessible and transparent. With this, it offers an attractive online alternative to traditional investment processes and is ready for the next generation of investors who take digital platforms for granted.

Removing barriers

Tim Rutgers, founder of Bloqhouse, says: "Our goal is to give everyone the opportunity to invest. With our platform also offering easy onboarding, we remove important barriers for both fund managers and investors and all regulatory requirements are met."

Rutgers' initial plan was to set up a real estate investment platform himself. He discovered that there were no good solutions to set up this process digitally and in an automated way. This gave birth to the idea for Bloqhouse Technologies, a cloud-based, one-stop-shop investment management platform that streamlines various processes such as KYC, contract signing, and payment handling, relieving users of these responsibilities. Some 60 clients in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg now use the Bloqhouse platform, which manages over 400 projects and funds.

Rutgers: "Streamlining all payment flows is an essential part of our target groups' experience. For one-to-one payments, we had this well set up from the start. Only for payments we need to make from our customers to multiple investors, such as paying out returns on investments, we did not yet have a good solution. For this, we had to do an export from our system and upload it to the banking environment to make the payments. We are always looking at how to set things up smarter and wanted to automate this manual operation as well."

No 'off the shelf' product

After a selection process, Bloqhouse partnered up with OPP. "Besides OPP being a reputable name, you notice that their focus is really on platforms. The expertise of the team was therefore an important reason for us to choose them," says Rutgers. "The solution we implemented with them is definitely not an 'off the shelf' product. They have been very thoughtful about how to make what they offer fit exactly with our needs and the needs of our customers. OPP is a very collaborative organisation, both in terms of people and technology."

To implement the solution in the platform, Bloqhouse's developers worked closely with OPP's specialists. "The cooperation goes very well because we speak the same language. This is nice, especially when there are issues. When investors receive money from a project, it is deposited in the personal account created by OPP for this purpose. OPP checks whether these people are indeed allowed to receive the money and takes care of distributions to all investors at once. This guarantees that transactions are carried out safely and compliantly. Moreover, automating this process saves us a lot of time."

The Bloqhouse platform with OPP's 'one to many' payment function is already used by organisations such as Broccoli, Capital Circle, Jild Financiert, Eijgen Finance, LVDH Finance, Hospitality Crowdfunding Netherlands and Hospitality Crowdfunding Belgium. "It is great that together we can support any financial instrument and any type of payout scheme a client wants to offer. This offers almost endless possibilities with which we can also distinguish ourselves internationally. Indeed, in addition to growth in the Netherlands, we are also looking across the border and, in addition to customers we already serve in Belgium and Luxembourg, we want to go further into Europe with our scalable platform. Thanks to OPP's international presence, we can continue to grow together," Rutgers concludes.