Flanks grabs additional capital to automate wealth services in Europe | TechCrunch

Flanks, which has built an API for automated wealth 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 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 Joaquim de la Cruz and Sergi Lao and private banking executive Álvaro Morales. Their vision was to digitize global wealth data across custodians and gather it under one API so that clients can have a complete view of their investment portfolio 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 leveraging the regulatory shift going on in Europe around open banking. More 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 not previously a way to share financial data with a third party or for financial advisors to know the global asset allocation of their customers. That’s why the company created its “open wealth” software.

“Open wealth means a movement in the industry to empower clients to share their data with third parties,” de la Cruz told TechCrunch. “Financial advisors can connect the information of their clients with two clicks on the platform, and then they can get all the wealth information — a 360-degree view — of the client in a single source of truth.”

Flanks operates in Spain, France and eight other countries. It connects with more than 300 banks internationally and aggregates more than half a million investment portfolios monthly. Over the past year it doubled the number of clients to 100 and focused on bigger clients with the potential to get Flanks in front of millions of end users.

Meanwhile, the company grew its revenue by more than 4x in the past 12 months.

The Series A funding will help the team continue to expand locations internationally and boost their product pipeline. Last year, Flanks created products on top of the data. For example, a no-code process so that financial advisors could use and analyze data. Another was if a client moved to a new bank, the financial advisor could change that on their end in two clicks.

“This is the best opportunity for data in years because now you can mix your data with AI and create a lot of vertical products,” de la Cruz said. “We want to continue building end-to-end use cases now and are developing a use case with OpenAI to connect the data so the financial advisor really can work with the data to help clients grow their portfolio.”