Rethinking financial advice with a wealth of data

Hello there,

Today’s startup solves a pain point I’m facing right now.

Scroll down to find out how Fuze wants to make life easier for financial advisers and their clients alike.

But first:

• If you’re a paying subscriber, you’ll get an email next week upgrading you to our new web-based Startup Tracker 🙌. We’re looking forward to sharing it with you!

• Want to know how to create a newsletter people can’t wait to open? Check out this webinar on Friday 26 January, and I’ll tell you!

– Martin

Fuze wants to rethink financial advice with a wealth of data

Last week, my financial advisers asked me for a bunch of bank statements and other documents to help them find me a new mortgage deal. 

It’s not a hard job for me to send them, but it’s a time-consuming pain to get everything together. It struck me: why can’t he easily access this stuff at the click of a button? In the future, because of a new startup called Fuze, he might be able to.

Fuze is building a SaaS platform aimed at financial advisers and wealth managers. Clients can connect all their financial accounts, including less obvious things like crypto wallets in addition to bank accounts and savings products. 

This provides a dashboard that helps advisers give better advice, with a full picture of each client’s financial situation that updates over time, instead of the static view they get today.

Right now, financial advisers might work off what the client tells them, or have to pore through bank statements and other data manually, or at least upload it to some software in a fragmented fashion.

If Fuze’s solution to this problem sounds like a simple idea, it’s intentionally so. 

“We've spent a lot of time on this, and tried to make it as simple as possible,” says Fuze co-founder Alex Simpson. “There's quite a bit of software in this industry that can take a while with onboarding for firms, which in this day and age is quite frustrating.”

Simpson says advisory firms can be onboarded within hours. The software is white-labelled for them, with company branding and all of their advisers set up as users. Once each adviser has logged in, they can add each of their clients. Clients then connect up all their accounts via built-in integrations.

“It will take someone around 15 or 20 minutes to add everything that they have; both traditional and non-traditional financial accounts plus, if they have collectibles, they can manually type those in. We then pull all that data through and display it in charts and tables, and we run analysis on it,” says Simpson.

The story so far

Simpson doesn’t have the most traditional path to becoming a tech founder - he previously juggled education with playing for professional cricket clubs.

Now he’s teamed up with his software developer father Paul to co-found Fuze.

“[Paul] has been a software developer for about 35 years, and ran a software business prior to this. I worked with him on and off while I was at uni… I helped him design and build a new version of the software that his company ran and operated.”

The idea to build Fuze came when Simpson junior signed up with a financial advisor and found himself in a similar situation to the one I have right now - having to manually collect all his data and statements together to create a static view of his finances.

“We ended up speaking to about 30 advisors, and it turned out they all did it in mostly the same way… We worked with a group of advisers to help design this, figure out what it is they need, what they want to see, what data they need access to, and then also we spoke to a lot of people who would be on the potential client side, to find out if they’d be happy to use it and if it would be of benefit.”

What’s next

Simpson says Fuze is a few weeks away from onboarding its first users, which he says will range from solo financial advisers to firms with up to around 20 advisers. The aim is to go live officially later in the year.

Beyond that, they’re working to integrate with more financial accounts and products, and planning a feature that can import data from PDFs and spreadsheets. 

They’re also working on integrations with software that financial advisers would like to send that data to. 

“We will be building integrations so we will pass data daily to their back office systems and their CRM system–so they're up to date, getting rid of the manual data entry–but also to things like cashflow planning tools,” says Simpson.

“At the moment, if an advisor uses Voyant, for example, they've got to find the client information, they type it into Voyant and then they can produce charts and reports off the back of that. Whereas we're going to build an integration with a couple of cashflow planning tools to just pass the data through. 

“Data and integrations are the initial priority. And then there are lots of things that we want to build after that.”

Go deeper on Fuze

Dig into much more on their funding, investment plans, vision, competition, and challenges:

Funding:

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.