As most people’s assets are spread across multiple institutions, investment and wealth management providers face a dilemma: ask clients to provide several documents themselves, or deal with limited data coverage from current providers, unstructured information, and hefty fees. None of these options support the instant, digital and personal experiences clients expect in this new digital era.
That’s why we built Investments.
With extensive coverage to over 75 platforms, you can now instantly retrieve user-permissioned data on your clients’ accounts, positions, transactions and securities — and utilize it to deliver better experiences.
Quick links
- Get the data you need
- NEW — Deploy quickly and simply with Flinks Hosted
- Make it easy for your clients
- Deliver better experiences
Get the data you need
Investments is based on the same secure and reliable technology that powers our retail banking data aggregation solution.
It transforms the way you access the information you need by sourcing high quality data directly from your clients’ investment accounts, with their consent.
Investments supports one-time data pulls, where you retrieve all the data within the account up to that point, as well as refreshes, which basically turns the connection into an ongoing data feed.
Coverage
While building Investments, one of our first considerations was to provide best-in-class coverage. We needed to ensure your clients could actually find and connect to the institutions that hold their assets.
Our data network currently supports connections to over 75 unique investment or wealth platforms spread across 45 financial institutions.
These include all major full service brokerages, discount/online brokerages, robo advisors, mutual fund companies, and employer portals, as well as certain specialty investment companies.
Data points
Investments return the following data points:
- Institution. The financial institution where the investment accounts exist.
- Accounts. The places where investment activity occurs.
- Positions. A point-in-time snapshot of the investment portfolio.
- Transactions. The historical activities that built the current portfolio.
- Securities. The details of the assets within the current or past positions.
We structure the data in a standard format across all institutions, which is something we found to be lacking from more traditional data providers. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to store and utilize it.
Deploy quickly and simply with Flinks Hosted
Flinks Hosted is a quick and simple option for wealth management firms that want to benefit from financial data connectivity without making a heavy tech investment.
We’ll create a customized end-user experience and embed it in a dedicated URL. You’ll simply have to share this URL with your clients, let them connect their financial accounts across different institutions, and access their financial data holistically on the Flinks Portal.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1 — Get set up
To set your firm up with Flinks Hosted, we’ll ask you to answer a short questionnaire. This will allow our team to customize your end-user experience on two aspects:
- Branding. We’ll add your logo and other aspects of your branding.
- Information gathering. We can add custom questions to the end-user experience to help gather any specific information you need from your users: basic contact information, reference number, etc.
Step 2 — Access the data
Once your clients have connected their accounts, you’ll be able to access their financial data by login into your Flinks Portal.
Make it easy for your clients
We make connecting to investment accounts a simple and intuitive flow. Your clients choose a financial institution, authorize a connection to their account, and wait a few seconds as their information is shared with you. They can then repeat the process to connect to any number of different accounts.
In the background, Flinks connects to the account, collects the information, and delivers it to you.
Deliver better experiences
While data can be used to deliver better experiences to your clients in many different ways, we’ve gathered a few real-world examples. Most of our beta users fit into one of these use cases:
Account switching
Using Investments, onboarding clients becomes quick and easy. You instantly get access to the information you need to open or transfer investment accounts, all provided with your clients’ consent.
Financial planning
Scattered investments leave you with a limited view of your clients' finances — either because you can’t access the information, or it’s not structured the same way and therefore hard to use.
The ability to retrieve standardized data from multiple account types across a broad range of institutions unlocks so much potential.
Investments enables you to base your advice on more than the assets a client has under your management: you’ll have full visibility over their entire portfolio and the ability to monitor change.
Not only will you be more confident that you are not overexposing this client — you’ll be equipped to optimize your financial planning and expand your relationship.
Asset verification for additional use cases, such as lending
While personal and mortgage lenders have come to use retail banking data to improve their credit risk models, checking and savings accounts only tell part of the story. Investments allows you to get a more holistic view of your clients’ finances by verifying investment assets as well.
Take your first step today
We built Investments as a better way to access the wealth and investment information you need.
Most financial businesses that implement data connectivity end up transforming their client experience for the best.
But if this is your first time engaging with the concept, you might find it a bit overwhelming. We get that — that’s why our dedicated team is available to figure out how to make Investments work in your context.
When it’s time to integrate Flinks, we provide options that are fast to configure and deploy, and we support full custom API integrations as well.
If you’re already using Flinks, or want a deep technical dive into Investments, check out our Dev docs!
Get started with Flinks today
