side has secured $8 million in Series A capital to build an API for automated wealth management services and democratize access to wealth management across Europe.
Earlybird Venture Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors JME Ventures and 4Founders Capital. Scalapay co-founder Raffaele Terrone and Upvest co-founder and CEO Martin Kassing supported the round as angel investors.
The Barcelona-based company was founded in 2019 by software engineers Joaquín de la Cruz and Sergi Rao, and private banking executive Alvaro Morales. Their vision is to digitize global asset data across custodians and bring it under one API so that customers can get a complete picture of their investment portfolios in real time and make more intelligent investment decisions. was to be collected.
Franks, whose clients range from major financial institutions to family offices and independent financial advisors, is taking advantage of ongoing regulatory changes in Europe, especially around open banking. Additionally, recently proposed legislation includes Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID III) focuses on open finance, establishing rights and obligations governing access to financial data beyond payment accounts.
Dela Cruz explained that with open banking, there was previously no way to share financial data with third parties or for financial advisors to understand their clients’ global asset allocation. That’s why the company created its “Open Wealth” software.
“Open wealth refers to a movement in the industry that allows customers to share their data with third parties,” Delacruz told TechCrunch. “Financial advisors can connect their clients’ information with just two clicks on the platform, allowing them to get all their client’s financial information (360-degree view) in a single source of truth. It will be.”
Flanks operates in Spain, France and eight other countries. We connect with over 300 banks around the world and aggregate over 500,000 investment portfolios every month. Over the past year he has doubled the number of clients to 100, focusing on large clients that could potentially bring his Flanks to millions of end users.
Meanwhile, the company has grown its revenue more than 4x over the past 12 months.
The Series A funding will help the team continue to expand its footprint internationally and strengthen its product pipeline. Last year, Flanks created a product based on data. For example, a no-code process that allows financial advisors to use and analyze data. Another is that if a customer moves to a new bank, her financial advisor can change banks with her two clicks.
“This is the best opportunity for data in years because data can be combined with AI to create many vertical products,” Dela Cruz said. “We now want to continue building end-to-end use cases, using OpenAI to connect data so that financial advisors can actually manipulate the data and help their clients grow their portfolios. We are currently developing a use case for this.”
Source: techcrunch.com
