Full Speed Ahead: Flinks Closes its Series A

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Flinks just raised $16M as part of a Series A round led by NAventures. We sat down with our CEO, Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, to discuss what this means for the future of Flinks.

A Series A is a significant milestone. It must feel pretty good!

Yes! Completing this Series A is very timely: we were well on track to reaching our previous objectives and it’s now time to face new, bigger challenges.

Sounds ambitious. What are the challenges you have in mind?

I’m from the school of thought that we only raise money when we’ve identified a critical problem that we want to address. Success, here, leads to meaningful growth, because it has real and positive impacts.

So far, our tech teams have concentrated their efforts on retail banking. One area of expansion will be to integrate a new type of information: wealth data. Flinks will enable connections to data sources in the wealth management space, through a new aggregation service. This is something we’re going to pull off in the near future — in fact, we’re already well into the beta phase.

Looking forward, we will focus on expanding our operations — which means our clients will have more opportunities to expand theirs.

We think markets across the globe have reached a significant level of maturity with data connectivity. In a world where data is abundant, being able to make sense of it, and more so to act on it, has become key competitive differentiators for financial businesses everywhere.

So we’ll expand our playground by launching Flinks internationally, starting with the US.

The tools we provide to enrich and utilize data are truly innovative, even outside of our home market.

They represent a real opportunity for US-based financial businesses — as well as any financial business whose goal is to operate on both sides of the frontier.

This, for us as an innovation partner, is really thrilling.

And finally, we’re acutely aware that current open banking ecosystems are strongly tilted towards data consumers — the digitally-enabled companies who are able to leverage financial data connectivity to deliver better services. It hasn’t yet delivered the same opportunities to the financial institutions acting as data suppliers. Our ambition is to bridge that gap by building a data network that is truly beneficial for all stakeholders.

When you think about it, these challenges are a natural extension of what we’ve been doing in the past two years or so.

What do you mean?

After we closed our seed round, we set out to do two things: build a highly reliable financial data aggregation service in Canada to make sure it could connect anyone, anywhere; and second, develop enrichment tools to put financial data to work more easily.

Our mission has been to help our clients connect their users to financial services they’ll love.

The theory was that we could bring tremendous value to the market by not only enabling businesses to access financial data, but also extract its full value. In short, contribute in a meaningful way to the digital transformation of financial services.

And we did it — our aggregation service is both robust and wide-ranging, we’ve been rolling out turnkey solutions that make it easier to drive digital transformation, and data enrichment with Attributes has been a real game changer for our clients.

Roughly 1 in 3 Canadians have connected their bank accounts with Flinks. So far, we’ve processed more than 300 million connections.

It’s now time to take everything we’ve learned servicing hundreds of financial businesses (and their millions of customers), and push the boundaries further.

Is there anything you’d like our current clients to take away from this announcement?

Simply put, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our clients who spend valuable time and resources to build better financial services. And so I want to say thank you!

You’ve helped us grow to where we are today — and this is just the beginning.

Always let us know about your needs and dreams. We’re fully committed to transforming finance with you.