Staying On Track

Getting commitments quickly

The greatest inhibitor of getting a deal closed on time is not having your investors lined up and ready to transfer when you make the invite available. As long as you’ve given your investors clear instructions, shared our Syndicate Investor Guide and have provided a deadline by which they need to wire (if applicable), you’ll be able to run and close your deal in a shorter timeframe.

When you communicate with investors up-front, it’s best practice to tell them exactly what documents they need to complete KYC, and inform them of the exact amount they need to wire to Odin. Also, you should ask your investors to notify you if they’re investing through a business entity, so you can share extra guidance.

While the Odin platform can handle fractional shares, if you’d like your investors to be able to claim EIS or SEIS relief, you’ll need to instruct them to wire in exact multiple of your share price. Relief can only be claimed for whole shares under each of these schemes.

Make sure your investors complete the account setup and investment flow in one sitting, if possible. Odin is optimised for mobile as well, so investments can be made while on the move as well. This process is much quicker from the second deal on, as investors won’t need to create an account or complete KYC/AML.

Tracking investors in the flow

From the ‘Investors’ tab on the deal page, you can see up-to-date information on each investor, concerning where they are in the investment flow.

Investors appear in this table once they’ve created an Odin account and have accessed the deal invite. From that point, you can infer how close they are to wiring via the following statuses:

Passed

This status denotes that the investor has passed on the opportunity to invest in your deal.

Account Incomplete

This status denotes that the investor is yet to complete their account setup with Odin before committing to the deal.

Awaiting AML

This status denotes that the investor is yet to submit their Source of Wealth form for anti-money laundering purposes.

Commitment Required

This status denotes that the investor has selected ‘invest’ rather than ‘pass’, but are yet to provide a commitment figure for the deal.

Payment Required

This status denotes that the investor has completed everything required during the investment flow, but is yet to wire their funds to Odin.

Transfer Initiated

This status denotes that the investor has wired their funds to Odin, but our team hasn’t yet been able to confirm receipt. If an investor is stuck in this stage for several days, it’s worth sharing supporting evidence of the transfer with Odin.

Payment Received

This status denotes that Odin has received the investor’s funds and the investor has therefore completed Odin’s investment flow.

Resolving issues

Most investor issues can be addressed via the Syndicate Investor Guide, but in complex and/or intractable circumstances a member of the Odin team can step in to help.

You can either email our support team via hello@joinodin.com and a member of the team will respond within 2 hours.

When onboarding your investors onto Odin, please let them know about our Customer Support resources, ensure they have access to the Syndicate Investor Guide, and make yourself open as the deal lead so they know to escalate any issues to you as well.

Unblocking common investor issues

KYC

Investors can sometimes experience issues in getting their KYC approved on Odin, and thus being permitted to invest. If an investor fails the KYC check, it’s almost always because the documents they uploaded didn’t comply with what we request and accept.

• Proof of Identity - This must always be a photo of the investor’s passport, driving licence or government-issued ID card. Scanned copies will be rejected.
• Proof of Address - We can only accept a copy of utility bill or bank statement issued within the last three months that displays name as per registration. E-statements are acceptable, but may require manual intervention from the Odin team to run them through image-checking software.

If they have failed in spite of this, it’s likely that our KYC provider has flagged the investor’s submission for another reason. In these cases, our Customer Support team are notified immediately to manually review the submission.

If there’s anything we need clarification on, we will reach out to the investor and manually approve their KYC once resolved.

AML

Similarly, certain investors can have trouble completing the additional AML form that’s triggered if they’re investing over a certain threshold or as a business. While the AML check is pending, the investor won’t be able to proceed beyond the ‘source of wealth’ holding page. If they’ve already submitted their form, they need not do it a second time!

For individual investors, the form is short and simple, and they’ll be notified once approved (usually within the hour of submission). Once they log back into Odin, they’ll be presented with the transfer instructions.

For those investing through a business entity, we require extra documentation (which differs depending on the type of business entity). The most common query here occurs when the PSCs are also companies, rather than individuals. In that case, please instruct the investor to reach out to our Customer Support team to conduct enhanced KYC.

If certain documents we request aren’t possible to share (because they don’t exist), please get the investor to share the closest possible thing.

• For example, if your investor is investing through a Limited Partnership in Delaware, there will be no ‘Certificate of Incorporation’. In its place, we’d accept a ‘Certificate of Limited Partnership’.

The below video guides outline the KYC process from an investor's perspective, both as an individual and as a business entity.

Payments

It’s understandable that, especially for time-sensitive deals, investors are keen to know the status of their payment and whether Odin has received it.

We have a near-100% acceptance rate for payments, and generally-speaking the only times we have issues are when transfers are sent from ‘high-risk countries’ or when the investor’s bank has blocked the transfer.

We aim to reconcile all payments we receive on the following working day. We conduct a manual reconciliation in the morning (UK time) for any payments that arrived the previous day. Odin also keeps a log of all irreconcilable payments that come through without a reference or a payer name and actively resolves them, so keep your investors assured we will never ‘miss’ a payment.

If your investor wires without a payment reference, the best practice is to ask them to contact our Customer Support team and flag this. That way, when the payment lands, our Deal Operations team will have a shortlist of investors to cross-check non-reconciled payments against.

If it’s been several days since a transfer was made by the investor and Odin hasn’t received it, we can raise the issue with Wise (our banking partner for investor transfers). To do so, we require at the very least a transfer receipt from the investor’s bank, and ideally an MT103.

• The investor’s transfer receipt must contain all of the following information, with no text obscured:
  • Sender full name
  • Sender account number
  • Recipient account number (and SWIFT code if applicable)
  • Date of transaction
  • Amount in sent currency
  • Payment reference used

If the investor’s bank refuses to approve the transfer for whatever reason, the investor can share their transfer instruction PDF from the platform, which is designed to function as a capital call. Failing that, Odin can arrange for a director’s resolution letter to be drafted which confirms the transaction and the relationship between Odin and the investor. This can be requested from our Customer Support team if other avenues have been exhausted.

If an investor didn’t transfer enough, or wants to increase their commitment, they can simply execute a second wire using the same transfer instructions and payment reference. Once reconciled, the total received will update in Odin.

If investors don’t hold a bank account in the currency your deal is denominated in, or have previously encountered issues with transferring to Odin, our advice is for them to create a bank account with Wise or Revolut, which will enable them to wire quickly and easily in any of the three currencies Odin currently supports deals in.

Note: Please advise investors to avoid using any saved Odin details to wire funds, as bank instructions and details may change, potentially leading to their payment being refunded.