One entrant is InvestCloud, which, as its name suggests, provides cloud-based front and middle-office solutions aimed at digitizing investor and advisor capabilities and ultimately experiences. Last week, the firm raised $45 million to boost its platform and functionality, as well as enhance its client service experience, and expand its global footprint to places including London and Zurich in 2016. Today, InvestCloud has over 650 clients on its platform with 150,000 users, and now supports over $1.4 trillion in assets.

Here, Wise goes into a little more detail about his career and the recent cash injection from FTV Capital, which was founded in 1998 as FTVentures.

Can you please outline your background in the space.

I am a financial services technology entrepreneur. I started my career in a research role for International Computers and was selected by Citibank to launch what is now Temenos.

After selling my first independent software company Synergo Technology, I created TCA Syntec company in Europe), before starting Netik EAI as an international financial messaging and integration company.

In 2002, Netik was refocused on data warehouse portal solutions, which were adopted by banks, custodians and prime brokers including Citibank, UBS, PNC, SEI, Fortis, BNP, Scotia and the Saudi Stock Exchange. In 2005, Netik was sold to the Bank of New York. I hold a double honors degree in Cybernetics and Computer Science, and am a Chartered Software Engineer in the UK.

Why did you start InvestCloud?

InvestCloud was a vision originally triggered by an article I read in 2008 in the Financial Times, entitled 'The Cloud.' I had no idea what the meaning of “the cloud” was, and I was very cynical about it and put the concept into a return to mainframe computing – but now I know how wrong I was.

The penny dropped two years later when thinking how to solve the problems of my last company, Netik . From Netik, I learned that financial institutions of all sizes suffer from the tyranny of Excel spreadsheets and legacy technology, as well as the risk and friction of disparate data systems. This problem is rooted in the programming culture of the past, which dictated that new features must be hard-coded.

Therefore, after selling Netik, I had a vision for building a fully-integrated fintech platform that was fully “cloud-native” and would focus on a single, clean source of data and thousands of lightweight applets that can be combined and configured into solutions in days and weeks, rather than months and years. This solution enables dynamic access to information via any device for both internal and external clients.

What need does InvestCloud fill in the industry?

InvestCloud’s proprietary technology platform enables a range of investment managers — including wealth advisors, single and multi-family offices, pensions/endowments, fund administrators and independent wealth platforms — to build and customize digital experiences that both streamline internal operations and present a branded customer-facing portal.

The platform’s highly configurable modules integrate dozens of disparate internal and external financial systems, accounts and products — handling client communications, client management, portfolio management, operational management and platform repository.

What plans do you have for the cash injection from FTV Capital?

Part of the investment from FTV will be used for buying out a minority portion of current shareholder ownership and the balance to fund operations. We will be focusing on building our New York presence and expanding into Europe and the UK by opening offices in London and Zurich. We will also be growing our sales and marketing, professional services, product development and operations teams.

Why have you decided to steer focus towards Europe?

InvestCloud’s vision is to create a leading global fintech company. With a tier 1 investor like FTV, it enables us to have more resources to open up international offices, and we are starting with London and then Zurich, Switerzland.

Ultimately, the plan is to have clients across the world. We will still be focusing primarily in North America. Europe has been slightly behind the US in cloud services adoption and is just now beginning to accelerate its licensing of the kind of solutions provided by InvestCloud. Our demonstrated success in the US along with the European and UK experience of several of our founders gives us a strategic advantage in focusing on these markets in addition to the US.

What differentiates InvestCloud from your competitors?

What differentiates InvestCloud is our unique approach based on using institutional-quality financial applets that quickly scale in a consistent manner.  We deploy “sets” of these applets to meet the customization needs of clients in a rapid and repeatable manner.  To achieve this vision, InvestCloud has created: a) an Applet Generator; b) an Interactive Data Repository / Warehouse IDRTM; and c) an Interactive Data Library IDLTM. 

The Applet Generator enables one business analyst to do the job of 50 programmers. The InvestCloud Interactive Data Repository / Warehouse is a model of the securities industry that pre-defines the vast majority asset classes used within the financial markets. The Interactive Data Library IDLTM is a library of business services, such as real-time position keeping and P&L, risk exposure, rebalancing, and performance analytics.

InvestCloud has created hundreds of information views, workflows and data collection applets, enabling the system to handle a nearly infinite number of custom client’s needs.  Using the Applet Generator these views were created in days rather than the weeks or months required by tradition coding approaches. Also significant is that the InvestCloud applets are pre-integrated to financial market exchanges, custodians, pricing vendors, government filing services and news aggregators. This pre-integration helps reduce implementation cycles from months and years to weeks and days.

In addition, InvestCloud emphasizes on the concept of “design first.” We are not only able to reduce the amount of time to build applications; we are also able to move design closer to the real designer and client, making customization truly cost effective and beautiful.

What trends are you seeing in the Fintech sector, and how do you see the industry developing over the next five years?

I believe that there will be a continued and accelerating migration away from locally installed enterprise software based on disparate and home-grown data assemblies toward the efficiency, security and broader integration offered by native cloud-based platforms.

We are currently in the phase where many clients are just coming to discover that the solutions being offered by legacy enterprise software vendors who have put web-based front ends on their old hard-coded applications is just a “half-step” toward the cloud. 

A true, fully cloud-native investment management platform like InvestCloud, which has no legacy code and a rapid proto-typing applet model, offers a dramatically more efficient and flexible way for a firm to future-proof their technology offering.