(Yonhap Interview) Fintech startup AIM aims to bring professional wealth services to ordinary investors

SEOUL, Aug. 9 (Yonhap) — Jihae Jenna Lee, a former portfolio manager at Boston-based hedge fund Acadian Asset Management, last year extended her “funeral date” by another five years.

Her robo-advisor asset management company, AIM (Automated Investment Management) Inc., founded in 2016, had grown significantly in its fourth year of operation, with the volume of combined assets under management (AUM) jumping threefold within months.

“When I saw the increase in numbers, I felt that I finally found a market for our product,” said Lee, CEO and founder of the company, during a recent interview with Yonhap News Agency.

“I thought, I’m not going to stop here,” she said.

By funeral date, she was referring to a self-imposed deadline to seek a meaningful level of business success and not pursue a goal indefinitely, she said.

“I had initially decided to try it for five years regardless of the outcome,” Lee said. “But as the business expanded exponentially, I had to extend the contract with myself.”

AIM is an asset management startup that provides advice tailored to individual investors based on an artificial intelligence-driven algorithm.

It now has roughly 700,000 users, or “AIMers,” as Lee affectionately called them, with cumulative assets of 998.4 billion won (US$764 million) as of Friday.

The company finally turned a profit last year based on robust business with customers, she said, adding that expanding operations without major investments made the company stronger and more resilient.

AIM raised only about 3.6 billion won in its Series A funding round at the first business stage, mainly due to “uncertainty in the country’s fintech industry.”

“Money can flow into really reliable and strong companies at a time when there is a lack of market liquidity,” she said.

Moving to the United States as a teenager, she earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at The Cooper Union.

Her life in the US got off to a rocky start, with her family nearly bankrupted by what she said was ill-fated financial advice.

The sudden evaporation of the family’s wealth and subsequent financial difficulties brought home the importance of making the right financial choices and of reliable professional help to manage and protect personal wealth, she said.

After graduation, she worked at Citigroup Asset Management as a quantitative analyst from 2004-06, applying mathematical and statistical methods to help companies make business and financial decisions. Then she moved to Acadian and worked there until February 2011.

She wanted to have a deeper knowledge of economics, and also studied econometrics at Harvard.

AIM’s primary goal in asset management, Lee said, is to place greater value on long-term investments and reduce risk at a loss of less than 10 percent, especially in economically volatile times like recent ones, by building a diverse portfolio.

The company has approximately 12,700 different investment destinations in 77 countries, according to Lee, selected based on analyzes of exchange-traded funds listed on the US stock market. AIM charges an annual service fee of 1 percent for invested assets, or a minimum of 50,000 won.

Lee said she sought to bring her years of expertise in managing wealth for institutional investors to South Korean retail investors, adding financial income, not labor income, is critical to solving problems stemming from rising wealth inequality.

– I have four years left until the next deadline in 2026. Until then, I will give everything to reach the goal, she said.

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