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In this conversation, we chat withEdward (Ed) Maslaveckas - CEO and co-founder at Bud Financial (Bud). Bud is an API platform with thoughtful data and service capabilities, is backed by world-renowned financial institutions and gearing up to have the largest team in the UK working on Open Banking.
Ed founded Bud alongside his school friend, George Dunning, in 2015. Under his leadership, Bud has grown to some 120 people, and secured more than 100m in investment. The company, which is headquartered in London, is leading the charge in making every financial decision simple by turning transactional data into rich customer insight. It counts global banks, credit bureaus and fintechs among its clients.
Ed is an economics graduate and became interested in financial services while working at Salesforce prior to founding Bud.
Topics: Fintech, open banking, embedded banking, banking, API, GenAI, AI, generative ai, artificial intelligence, data aggregation
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1’18: Evolution of Ed’s fintech career: The journey from tech enthusiast to influencing the UK's vibrant financial technology scene
6’32: From consumer app to B2B platform: Bud's evolution amidst the neobank wave and the challenges of data integration in fintech
14’14: Decoding customer insights in fintech: Mastering data enrichment and unlocking personalized financial solutions
20’58: Unlocking transaction data's potential: How advanced AI is transforming financial institutions' approach to customer insights
23’19: Transforming financial services with AI: Bud's role in enhancing banks' transaction analysis and customer engagement strategies
30’57: AI and financial well-being: Navigating the balance between automation and user comfort in personal finance apps
37’01: Redefining workflows in banking: The integration of AI agents for enhanced enterprise efficiency and customer engagement
41’59: Shaping the future of fintech: How generative AI and advanced data capabilities are transforming financial services
45’37: The channels used to connect with Ed & learn more about Bud
Sneak Peek:
Ed Maslaveckas: …so, we began building our own infrastructure ourselves, which the screen scraping piece was certainly a challenge. And that was one of the challenges with the core product early on.
The second and third challenges being, one, around when we got hold of the data, being able to enrich it, and be able to really understand the transactions and the customers based off of the transactions. Like teach machines to understand the who, what and where of transactions. Which went on to be what is the core capability of Bud.
And the third piece was this idea that when you're getting this live stream of data, one of the cool things we built at Bud, which was quite unique was not only were we trying to bring in transactional data, we were actually integrating third party product APIs. Because as I mentioned, there was this ecosystem of FinTechs, but a lot of them were actually building APIs into their core products. So actually, before open banking rolled around, Monzo actually had APIs for a lot of their products and services that you could access. People like TransferWise and people like, there was another transfer company called WorldFirst that was bought by, I think it was Alipay or someone, they had APIs to the extent that you could, through our integration with them on a Bud app, you could deposit money into their account, you could then create an FX trade and push money to a different product all on the WorldFirst system through a set of APIs.
So, we had this idea that we could be bringing in not just transaction data but product usage data through this marketplace of services. And then use all of that data together to create this live updated feed of who the customer is and their financial position to always give them the best recommendation.
Now, that was a huge technical challenge. And one that I think is only getting solved today with some of these new language models in terms of understanding the customer data and being able to give them realtime assistance.
So, there was these three technical challenges. One was getting data, second was understanding that transaction data, third was…
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