Open wealth platform Flanks has secured $8 million in a Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, and followed by the existing investors JME Ventures and 4Founders Capital.
Raffaele Terrone, co-founder of the Italian FinTech unicorn Scalapay, and Martin Kassing, co-founder and CEO of Upvest, supported the round as angels.
Barcelona-based Flanks offers a single API for aggregated wealth data across custodians, providing clients with a rounded view of their investment portfolio in real-time. Compatible with more than 300 banks internationally, the company aggregates more than half a million investment portfolios monthly.
Founded in 2019 by software engineers Joaquim de la Cruz and Sergi Lao and private banking executive Álvaro Morales, Flanks serves clients from large financial institutions to family offices and independent financial advisors.
With the new capital to hand, the startup plans to tap into further parts of the wealth management value chain, automating manual processes - from profiling, reporting, to investment memorandums - and adding algorithms for intelligent alerts and investment decisions.
Álvaro Morales, chief strategy officer of Flanks and former global head of private banking of Banco Santander, comments: "Up until now, many financial advisors did their job without knowing the global asset allocation of their customers. The upcoming MiFID III regulation will likely require more detailed attention to the investor's pre-existing wealth prior to giving financial advice. The technology offered by Flanks, powered by this funding round, is going to transform the interaction between financial advisors and customers."