Bud, a UK-based fintech startup, has raised $20m investment from in a Series A funding round, led by HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Banco Sabadell, ANZ and Investec.
Other investors, who took part in the Series A funding round, include 9Yards Capital and Lord Fink, the former CEO of the hedge fund Man Grou, revealed Bud, which enables people automate their personal finances.
The personal finance company achieves the automation through the combination of data from banks and financial service providers. Its platform connects banking apps and financial products and services to create new finance experiences for its users.
Bud’s platform combines open banking data and artificial intelligence to enable banks to create a new generation of finance app, which integrates products from third parties to produce insights and simplify customer experiences.
The company claims that for fintechs and service providers it offers single-point access to customers through its network of banks.
Bud CEO and cofounder Ed Maslaveckas has been quoted by Yahoo Finance UK as saying: “We were expecting and seeing a shift in the market from a traditional ‘I serve my customer my products and I build an experience around that’ to actually ‘how do we go beyond that and create a very customer-centric service model?”
The fintech startup, which was founded four years ago by developing its own app, has grown on to work with bank partners to introduce a ‘layer of control’ at the scale of an institution, wrote Sam Oakley, the company’s co-founder.
Currently, the company claims to have 85 providers ready to have their services available through the network.
Bud, which has a workforce of nearly 70 people, is looking to expand its team further.
Oakley wrote: “The pace of change has been rapid, but we’ve worked hard to keep the important things the same. Despite our growth, we’ve done everything we can to stay focused on the original vision?—?we make money simpler for people so that they have more control over life.
“This has helped us build a company with a distinctive internal culture and we’ll stay focused on that as we double in size again by the end of 2019.”