Digital currency exchange Independent Reserve is increasing its activities in the SMSF market this year after experiencing overwhelming demand from trustees looking to add digital currency assets to their portfolios.
“We’ve been talking to SMSF administrators and other businesses along the SMSF supply chain and we’re going to ramp that up this year,” Independent Reserve head of strategy Lasanka Perera told selfmanagedsuper.
“Our plan is to start working closer with them and understanding the needs of their customers as this is an area that we’d really like to grow into.
“In addition to that, we’re talking to one of the big four accounting firms about integration, which will better enable SMSFs [to invest in cryptocurrencies] with the reporting requirements, so this year the strategy for Independent Reserve is to actively target the SMSF industry and the suppliers.”
The exchange launched its SMSF product about 12 months ago.
Perera said it had 6000 to 7000 SMSF investor users out of 100,000 current users.
Independent Reserve chief executive Adrian Przelozny revealed the exchange had also received interest to integrate directly with platforms SMSFs used to manage their accounts and audits.
“We launched after hearing from a few different people about how they wanted to use their SMSF to invest in this space and we weren’t expecting too much interest, but we were overwhelmed with the interest we received and now SMSFs are the largest-growing part of our customer base,” Przelozny said.
“As far as we know, we’re the only [digital currency] exchange that’s able to onboard SMSFs in a compliant way so they’re able to create an account that then allows the auditor to look at their independent reserve account and tick all the right boxes.
“We provide a suite of reports and extracts that a person running an SMSF can use to then report into any of the platforms they use to manage the fund, and we’ve had a number of auditors review the reports we have to ensure compliance.
“SMSFs have seen us as the most trustworthy and pro-regulation exchange out there.”
Independent Reserve currently allows the trading of bitcoin, ether and bitcoin cash.
The exchange is adding 1000 to 2000 new users and taking in deposits of $15 million to $20 million a day.
It was founded in Sydney in 2013.
