“We are here to help every potential client who invests with us realize their long and short term financial goals. After all, your success is our success. Genius Funds always focuses on the end result – stable and high profits with the lowest possible risk. We will do our best to make sure we meet your expectations and goals.” That was a statement of Mark Stelvio, managing director of Genius Investments Limited, when he was interviewed last year on November. And the team of Ecommerce Journal decided to figure out if this investment project along with the words cited is really worthy of our trust.

Genius Funds (www.geniusfunds.com) is owned by Genius Investments Limited and is registered at 6 Karaiskakis Street, Limassol in the republic of Cyprus.


There are 2 types of investment plans that you can choose at Genius Funds:
•    Emerging Markets Growth fund EMGF 1.0% - 1.9%, Daily payments
•    World Bond Market Fund WBMF 6.0% - 9.0%, Weekly payments

At the moment Genius Funds accepts liberty reserve, SolidTrustPay and bank wire transfers.

 

The website of Genius Funds features modest but functional design. There is nothing excessive or irrelevant. Main colors are white and different shades of blue. Everything is arranged in a serious and business-like manner. The interface is simple, intelligible and supports two additional languages other than English, including Chinese and Indonesian. It speaks to the credit of the service as long as it proves that Genius Funds is striving to become an international investment project which among other things takes into account the potential of Asian market. 

In the upper menu bar you can find such buttons as ‘Create an account’, ‘Log in’, ‘Contact us’, ‘Become a partner’ and ‘Our ratings’.

The developers seem to take care about the newcomers and made provisions for tuition section known as “Investor education”. Here you can find quite thorough information on what kind of investments you can make with Genius Funds, what kind of funds are available there, how you can use online currencies to deposit funds and others.
 
In order to start you registration you can go to the section ‘Create an account’. The registration procedure is very simple.

The firs step is to specify your account type. You need to select ‘Individual’ or ‘Business’ profile.
 
The registration as well as al the operations within the website are protected by the 256-bit encryption. When you follow to the second step you will be requested to fill in the short application form where you will specify your personal data such as name, city, country and a number of your Liberty Reserve or SolidTrustPay accounts.
 
Then you need to provide your contact details such as email address and contact number (optionally). Create your own password, specify secret question for further password restorations and TPIN code. The TPIN or Telephone PIN is required for your authorization when you make calls to their telephone information system. In those cases when you do not have a computer or internet connection available you may call any time you wish to check your account balances or get latest information about their funds.
 
When your form is complete and you are sure you provided the correct information you enter the ‘Verification code’ and press ‘Register’.

The system automatically generates a message and sends it to the email address you specified. In the message you will be advised of the successful registration and the account number that was assigned to you. Now you need to activate your account by entering your number and password.

Your member area is as simple and convenient as the main page. There is everything you need to perform relevant transactions and other operations with your funds.
 
In order to deposit your account press the button ‘Deposit funds’ in the left panel as you can see on the picture above. The system will offer you three options out of which you can select the one that I more suitable to you.
 
When you selected the appropriate method you press ‘Proceed’ and on the next page you will need to specify the amount you want to enter into the project.
 
After you press ‘Proceed’ the system will automatically redirect you to the page of the ecurrency service you selected. In our case we specified Liberty Reserve. The funds are deposited almost immediately from you Liberty Reserve account (about 5 minutes) while the funds from SolidTrustPay are deposited within 2 or 3 hours.

In order to invest in Genius Funds a customer needs to buy shares. For these purposes you can enter ‘Purchase shares’ section. There you will be offered two types of shares. Choose the fund which interests you and press the "Buy" button. You will then be taken to the confirmation page where you will specify how many shares of the fund you wish to purchase. Each share costs $1. Share prices do not fluctuate.
  
The dividends are distributed per the rules stipulated for each respective investment fund. For World Bond Market fund the dividends are paid weekly on Mondays. For Emerging Market Growth Fund the dividends are distributed daily, with the exception of weekends and public holidays.

Dividends become available for withdrawal immediately after being posted to your account.

In addition to the investment funds Genius also offers another investment product ‘Genius CD’. It is meant for investors who are looking for a medium-income, short-term investment. The term of the investment is three months and the interest is fixed at 6% per month, 18% per term while the investment term on shares of the funds lasts from 150 to 180 days from purchase and income ranges from 5 to 9 percent per week.
 
The service seems to care about the legal aspect of their business which inspires trust and respect to the owners of the project. e-currency deposits that were not used to purchase fund shares or invest into Genius CD are subject to a 60 day holding period due to anti-money laundering regulations.

Genius Funds didn’t forget the affiliate incentive as well. A user that refers an investor to Genius will receive a 6% commission from their referral's purchase of Genius shares and 3% commission on their referral's investment into the Genius CD account. Not bad!

What is notable with the project is that it is constantly improving and upgrading. During the current year Genius is planning to introduce a new fund that will track BOVESPA and Straits Times indexes. The fund will be an index fund, with variable share prices, tied to the average performance of Brazilian and Singapore markets. Shares will also distribute weekly dividends. Additionally, Genius Investments filed an application for a full banking license. The application is estimated to be approved by late 2009. Genius Investments is seeking a license to provide international banking services to customers around the world.

 

One more positive aspect with Genius Funds is their Customer Support service. If a user has any problems the company staff is ready to answer all the questions that arise when working with the system. Genius Funds provides its replies within 24 hours and it offers a wide range of methods to contact the company representatives. Customers can select to either email their inquires, send it by post, go to the live support chat or call to the Support team. By the way there are two numbers for those who need to contact Customers Support: one for Europe and another one for Asia. We should underline that this is not just our opinion, other users expressed their content with the Genius' customer service on numerous forums on the Internet.

Well, our impressions of the service were positive. Information protection, immediate funding via payment processors and good interests – we think you may at least go and learn more about it yourselves.