Digital Wealth: Apex & Unifimoney offer roboadvisory and asset custody to banks
First Fidelity Bank, a community bank with $2.6B in AUM, is the first customer to go live with Apex via Unifimoney
Hi Fintech Futurists —
Welcome back to Digital Wealth. Today we highlight the following news —
NORTH AMERICA: ICE Announces A Unique Wealth Management Platform Integration With BNY Mellon | Pershing
EMEA: BondIT Secures $14MM In Funding In Round Led By BNY Mellon
ASIA PACIFIC: Akros Technologies, An AI-powered Asset Management Platform, Raises Funding From Z Holdings
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North America News
⭐🇺🇸 Apex Fintech Solutions And Unifimoney Announce Partnership To Provide America’s Credit Unions And Community Banks With Digital Investment Solutions - Businesswire, December 13, California
Apex Fintech Solutions (Apex) and Unifimoney have partnered to provide banks and credit unions access to Apex's custody engine and Unifimoney's Turnkey Asset Management Platform (TAMP). Apex Clearing Corporation, a subsidiary of Apex, provides clearing and custody services to leading fintech brokerages and RIAs such as Ally Invest, Betterment, M1 Finance, and SoFi Wealth. Apex has custody of over $100B in client assets from 20MM+ investors.
Unifimoney is already integrated into several online banking platforms, including Jack Henry, Banno, and Q2i. In terms of solutions, Unifimoney offers its (1) low-cost roboadvisor (charging a 0.30% advisory fee), in which ETF portfolios are matched to your chosen risk profile and rebalanced quarterly; (2) commission-free trading executed by Apex; (3) digital assets trading and custody via crypto exchange Gemini, and (4) fractional investing in precious metals.
First Fidelity Bank (FFB), a community bank with $2.6B in AUM, recently launched a digital wealth management service in which FFB customers can access Unifimoney via the bank's existing core banking platform Jack Henry — the bank is the first customer to go live with Apex via Unifimoney. Coupling a roboadvisor with a custodian, and distributing through a core banking system, is smart from an integration and go-to-market perspective. It also highlights just how complex and segmented the traditional financial infrastructure is — navigated best by bank holding companies and mega-custodians like BNY Mellon, Citigroup and JP Morgan. Hopefully fintech can make things a bit more accessible.
🇺🇸 Morgan Stanley Buys Technology, Hires Entire Staff of Robo-Advisor Blooom - Barron’s, December 7, New York
🇺🇸 ICE Announces A Unique Wealth Management Platform Integration With BNY Mellon | Pershing - Businesswire, December 14, New York
🇺🇸 J.P. Morgan Partners With Trovata To Enhance Corporate Cash Management - American Banker, December 13, New York
EMEA News
⭐🇮🇱 BondIT Secures $14MM In Funding In Round Led By BNY Mellon - Finovate, December 7, Herzliya
Invest-tech platform bondIT closed a $14MM Series C funding round, bringing the company's total funds raised to $32MM. BNY Mellon led the latest investment with participation from investors like Fosun, SixThirty, Talanx AG and Win.d. The firm's previous funding round was in early 2018 (for $4MM). The long gap from the prior round and the timing of current investment caught our attention, which suggests they spent a lot of time building and found some traction.
bondIT uses machine learning models to deliver three different products that institutions can integrate — Frontier, Scorable, and Embedded. Frontier offers cloud-based portfolio management capabilities with various APIs. Scorable aggregates data and optimizes bond allocations with credit risk requirements to forecast credit ratings of ~3,000 corporate and financial issuers within a 12-month timeframe. Embedded allows customers to balance portfolios in real-time and automate credit research and risk management.
Our previous coverage highlights that activity in fixed income and other products remains active and resilient - most likely caused by the importance of fixed income during an inflationary period (see Yubi launch, AlgoBulls $2MM raise, ATRAM and Additive partnership, Deserv hitting a $120MM AUM milestone, and ADDX fractionalizing venture debt funding). We are excited to see more granular financial engineering becoming automated and more widely available.
🇨🇭 A Leading US Financial Institution Selects Temenos To Modernize Its Wealth Management Platform In The Cloud - Temenos, December 7, Geneva
🇬🇧 Modus Leads Koble’s $1.2MM Pre-Seed Round - Wamda, December 8, London
🇰🇪 Kenyan Wealthtech Startup Hisa Prepares For Scale After Receiving Regulatory Approval - Disrupt Africa, December 9, Nairobi
Asia Pacific News
⭐🇰🇷 Akros Technologies, An AI-powered Asset Management Platform, Raises Funding From Z Holdings - TechCrunch, December 8, Seocho
South Korean artificial intelligence (AI)-driven fintech start-up Akros Technologies announced on Friday the that it has raised $2.3 milion in a strategic funding round prior to the scheduled Series A funding round next year. buff.ly/3iTlbWsAI-driven wealthtech Akros Technologies has raised $2.3MM from Z Venture Capital, bringing Akros's total amount raised to $6.1MM since its 2021 inception. In March, Akros raised $3.75MM in funding from PeopleFund, a South Korean peer-to-peer lending platform.
Akros has a deep quant team, which is becoming a requirement to win against passive indexing: CEO Kyle Moon, Chief Security Officer Jin Chung and Chief Marketing Officer Justin Gim. Moon previously worked as head of AI research at Qraft Technologies, Gim spent nine years at Mirae Asset Global Investments and Astra Asset Management, and Chung conducted Bayesian deep learning research at Oxford Robotics Institute. This reminds us of Arta, which raised $90MM for its Series A last month, whose leadership team has ML research experience too — Charles Dong, formerly head of growth at GooglePay, and Chirag Yagnik, a former Google research and ML engineer.
The AI-powered product portfolio management as a service (PMaaS) is supposed to help wealthtechs and roboadvisors reduce traditional fund development costs by 80%+. Akros's PMaaS offers (1) 100 TB+ of simulation-ready, preprocessed data dating back to 1910; (2) a portfolio engine and management system, (3) quant hedge-fund-level alpha research; (4) GPT-3 to analyze unstructured language data; and (5) equity factor-level and macro-level risk analysis.
In terms of AI, Akros applies a generative model based on a decision transformer, which predicts future actions through the sequencing model. In addition, Akros listed an AI-driven target income ETF called Akros Monthly Payout, which targets a 7% return annually (paid monthly).
It's as though Akros is trying to merge the capabilities of SharingAlpha, Avaloq, Addepar, FNZ, Delphia, and Farther — ambitious but likely too much to bite. Building workflows is one thing, building investment strategy is another, and it is important for companies to understand their core value proposition. If you are a genius like Jim Simons, and can hire quants who hires other quants to generate alpha returns at Renaissance, maybe just focus on that!
🇭🇰 SoFi, WeLab, Syfe – 3 Top Robo-Advisors Join MoneySmart - Macau Business, December 12, Hong Kong
🇸🇬 Moomoo SG Observes Asset Influx To Wealth Management, Group's AUM Hits SGD $5.27B - PR Newswire Asia, December 12, Singapore
🇦🇺 Brisbane Fintech Digital Surge Is The Latest Cryptocurrency Exchange In Voluntary Administration - Startup Daily, December 9, Brisbane
Blogs, Webinars, Podcasts
🇮🇳 The Need For Simplicity & Transparency In Wealthtech - The Times of India, December 8, Mumbai
🇺🇸 AI, Blockchain Technology To Push The Wealth Management Software Market To New Heights…Eventually. - Financial Planning, December 8, New York
🇺🇸 Alts Access Integral To Financial Advisor Success In 2023 - Wealth Management, December 12, New Jersey
🇬🇧 Em Conversa: Investor Inclusion With Structure.Fi - The Fintech Times, December 13, London
Events & Reports
🇺🇸 Wealth Management EDGE - Informa Connect, May 21 - 24, Florida
🇬🇧 Private Banking & Wealth Management London Conference & Awards 2023 - Arena International, June 14, London
🇬🇧 Digital Integration In Wealth Management 2023 - Arena International, February 21-22, London
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