French startup Finary has raised a $9 million Series A round (€8 million). The company has built a comprehensive aggregator so that wealthy individuals can get the full picture when it comes to tracking wealth. And that means that Finary isn’t restricted to bank accounts. You can track a lot of assets, from real estate to cryptocurrencies and stocks.
And the startup’s vision hasn’t changed much since my original post on the company. Aggregating data was just the first step. Finary wants to build a private bank from scratch with a different set of founding principles.
If you think about the private banking industry, there is a misalignment between customers and banks. Instead of generating revenue from customers directly, banks try to sell financial products and generate revenue from those products. They call it financial advice, but it’s just a shady sales process.
“Because we’re independent, we can tell you everything. Existing actors only suggest solutions that generate commissions for them,” co-founder and CEO Mounir Laggoune told me.
Finary believes the next generation of rich people will be looking for a different experience. They’ll want to see information directly and make educated decisions on their own. In other words, just like you no longer call your banker to transfer money to a family member, Finary wants to empower wealthy people with the right tools and information.
Some existing investors are leading today’s round in Finary, namely Speedinvest and Y Combinator. Business angels are also participating, such as Qonto’s founders Steve Anavi and Alexandre Prot, as well as Bitpanda’s Eric Demuth.
But that’s not all. Finary also believes that building a new private bank also means that the most active customers should be able to own a stake in the startup. The startup will soon launch an equity crowdfunding campaign.
In practical terms, people will be able to invest as little as €10 to buy shares or fractions of a share through an equity crowdfunding platform that is launching soon in France. “We have allocated €500,000 but we’re OK with some ‘overfunding’,” Laggoune said.
Since my previous post, Finary has launched a mobile app for both iOS and Android. That app has become a popular way to access the service as users tend to check their Finary account nine times per week on average — that’s more than once per day.
The startup has also added more integrations and it can now track 10,000 different pockets of money in France, the U.S., Canada, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. For instance, you can connect several bank accounts, stock trading accounts, add your real estate, gold bars, the public address of your cryptocurrency wallet, etc.
Finary is using several API-based aggregators to track accounts, such as Plaid and Budget Insight. It also runs bitcoin and Ethereum nodes to track wallet addresses.
Overall, the startup has attracted 30,000 users and tracks €10 billion worth of assets — it means that on average the company’s users track more than €300,000 each. The company currently makes money through a premium subscription that costs €10 per month.
And this is where the product gets interesting. In addition to aggregating data, Finary can make recommendations. For instance, the service helps you uncover hidden fees in mutual funds. Users can also generate performance reports and learn how they could diversify their investments through different geographical allocations, sectors and risk profiles.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to fully cover financial institutions in the U.K., Germany and Switzerland. The company is also working on additional features, such as a family mode, a better way to track RSUs (or BSPCE in France) and the ability to separate personal wealth from professional wealth.
Finary will hire 25 additional people. There are many potential product expansions down the road. For instance, you could imagine buying cryptocurrencies directly from the platform. The service could also help you with tax filings. By the end of 2022, Finary expects to grow its userbase tenfold and reach 300,000 users.
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