Finbourne raises £55M to break down financial data silos with AI – SiliconANGLE

U.K.-based financial data management startup Finbourne Technology Ltd. said today it has closed on a £55 million ($70 million) middle-stage funding round to help make life easier for investment managers and financial institutions by providing them with artificial intelligence-powered insights.

Today’s Series B round was led by Highland Europe and AVP, and comes after the company closed on a £15 million investment in 2021.

The company was established in 2016 by a team of bankers and investors who previously worked at institutions such as UBS Group AG and Nomura Holdings Inc. Their mission is to reinvent the way financial firms store, access and analyze financial and investment data.

The company says its platform is used by hundreds of asset managers, asset owners and asset servers, who benefit from more reliable insights, greater efficiency and scalability, the company said.

The financial community is one that has become increasingly reliant on big data analytics. The work of modern investment managers involves analyzing masses of big data to try and understand the future prospects of businesses around the world, so they can identify the best investments for their clients. And that process is becoming increasingly automated through the use of AI.

Breaking down silos

Finbourne is aiming to becoming an industry leader in that regard. Co-founder and Chief Executive Thomas McHugh told TechCrunch that he previously worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was the world’s largest bank in 2008, only to fall into the abyss after finding itself overexposed to the U.S. subprime lending crisis that year.

RBS ultimately managed to stave off a total collapse, and McHugh was tasked with helping to reorganize the bank’s data stack in order to break down its siloed data structures so it could prevent such a situation ever arising again. He explained that because the bank’s various business units all operated in silos, its costs had spiraled out of control. “We had to rip out hundreds of millions of costs out of the business,” he explained.

McHugh did that by transforming RBS’ data infrastructure. He was inspired by the rise of Amazon Web Services Inc., the cloud computing infrastructure giant that was just two years old at the time. Although AWS had yet to grow into the behemoth it is today, McHugh said he could see already that it offered a compelling, alternative model for how data could be stored and used.

RBS ended up building a big data stack that span across every single financial asset class, consolidating all of its financial information into one enormous pool of data. Its credit, equity and fixed income systems were all migrated onto the same platform.

Having founded Finbourne, McHugh now applies this more efficient data model to other financial organizations. Banks can run their entire operations on its cloud platform instead of using their own systems, similar to how a company might run its entire sales organization on a platform such as Salesforce.

Finbourne’s flagship product is the LUSID platform, which is a software-as-a-service offering that’s said to deliver “front-to-back functionality across portfolio management, fund accounting, order management, compliance and more”. The LUSID platform includes components such as the LUSID Operational Data Store, which spans books of record for investments and accounting; asset management analysis tools; a portfolio management platform that tracks cash, positions, exposure and so on; and a data virtualization tool for insights.

Of course, Finbourne infuses AI models throughout its technology stack, with their primary purpose being to automate data management and dig up useful insights for investors. In addition, the startup also provides tools for preparing AI training data, and has plans to expand further into that realm.

Business has been booming for Finbourne, and the startup claims a number of new client wins in sectors such as banking, capital markets and investment management, where its customers include Northern Trust Corp., the Pension Insurance Corp. and Omba Advisory & Investments Ltd.

Finbourne’s investors say they’re convinced about the company’s prospects. Tony Zappala, a partner at Highland Europe, said it’s helping to move financial institutions away from their inefficient legacy technology stacks onto a modern data architecture that supports more efficient operations and decision-making.

Those sentiments were shared by AVP General Partner Imran Akram, who said he has been convinced that the company is onto something ever since 2020, when he first saw how it could integrate investment data into a single platform. “This is a clear differentiator and especially important to the emerging AI wave,” he said.

Finbourne said the money from today’s round will help to support the next phase of its commercial development, which calls for an expansion of its sales, product and marketing capabilities in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Singapore and Australia.

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