Born and raised in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood, Reginald Cash left home for New York City 14 years ago to pursue a career in financial services. A University School graduate, Cash earned a degree in economics from Columbia University and went on to become the one of the youngest directors of investor relations on Wall Street – working for both Deutsche Bank and UBS – raising billions in capital.
After a while on Wall Street, Cash’s hometown and his entrepreneurial spirit kept drawing him back. “After I had some professional success, my Cleveland roots started calling at me,” he recalls. “In Cleveland, it’s pretty important to give back to the city itself. That part of me never really left. It was tugging at me to build something and build something in Cleveland.”
So earlier this year Cash moved home and started MarkersA – a company created around an investor relations tool that aggregates financial data for real time communication. Cash came up with the idea based on his job experiences.
“I could relate information very quickly and I know who was the best person to receive it, who needed it when,” he explains. “I learned very early that I kind of had a knack for that. So, I created a tool that aggregates that information, identifies the relationships among information and provides some hints on who would be best placed with the information.”
Cash says he’s found the investment industry is behind the times in communications. “Right now, we [investor relations] report out earnings every three months,” he explains. “That idea is really dated. We communicate in real time and that’s the expected rate of communication. Financial communications have to join the world of real time communications.”
MarkersA does just that. “We want to be the tool where a company can begin to communicate with their shareholders, their stakeholders in real time,” Cash says. “We aggregate and bring all that information into one place.”
In fact, MarkerA has caught the attention of some big Cleveland players, Cash says. KeyBank, Parker Hannifin, Invacare and RPM International are all interested in the product. “The reception that we’ve had from local companies has been great,” he says.
Cash met with Flashstarts' Charles Stack about his business idea. While he didn’t go through the accelerator program, he was one of the early tenants of StartMart. “I was one of first people to raise my hand and say ‘I want to be a part of this,’” Cash says. “We’re excited. The space is great – it’s really turning into a great community. Moving back to Cleveland, we’ve been able to get audiences with larger companies. People want to invest in our ecosystems and I don’t think we’ve been turned away yet.”
Cash already has three employees and is looking for more.