[ad_1]
Flanks, which created an API for automated money services, secured $8 million in Series A capital to democratize access to wealth management across Europe.
EarlyBird Venture Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors JME Ventures and 4Founders Capital. ScalaPay co-founder Rafael Terrone and UpWest co-founder and CEO Martin Kassing backed the round as angel investors.
The Barcelona-based company was founded in 2019 by software engineers Joaquim de la Cruz and Sergi Lao and private banking executive Alvaro Morales. Their vision was to digitize custodians’ global wealth data and aggregate it under a single API so clients can see a complete view of their investment portfolios in real-time and make more intelligent investment decisions.
Flanks, whose clients span from large financial institutions to family offices to independent financial advisors, is taking advantage of the ongoing regulatory change around Open Banking in Europe. Recent proposed legislation, including the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID III), is focusing on open finance to establish rights and obligations to manage financial data access beyond payment accounts.
As de la Cruz explains it, with Open Banking there was previously no way to share financial data with any third party or for financial advisors to know the global asset allocation of their clients. That’s why the company created its “Open Wealth” software.
“Open wealth means a movement in the industry to empower customers to share their data with third parties,” de la Cruz told TechCrunch. “Financial advisors can connect their clients’ information to the platform with two clicks, and then they can get all of a client’s asset information in a single source of truth – a 360-degree view.”
Flanks operates in Spain, France and eight other countries. It connects with over 300 banks internationally and aggregates over half a million investment portfolios monthly. In the last year it has doubled the number of customers to 100 and focused on larger customers with the ability to get flanked in front of millions of end users.
Meanwhile, the company has grown its revenue by more than 4 times in the last 12 months.
The Series A funding will help the team continue to expand locations internationally and boost their product pipeline. Last year, Flanks built products on top of data. For example, a no-code process so financial advisors can access and analyze data. The second was that if a customer moved to a new bank, the financial advisor could switch on his behalf in two clicks.
“This is the best opportunity for data in years because now you can combine your data with AI and create a lot of vertical products,” de la Cruz said. “We now want to continue building end-to-end use cases and are developing a use case with OpenAI to connect data so that financial advisors can really help clients grow their portfolios.” to work with the data.”
