By Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and Co-Owner at INSART
| Site | www.quovo.com |
| Established | 2010 |
| Clients | FinTech companies, financial enterprises, and financial advisors |
| Value Proposition | Quovo is a financial data platform, which empower its clients with account connectivity and insight tools delivered via its API and user interface widgets |
| Top Executives | Lowell Putnam, Cofounder, CEO Niko Karvounis, Cofounder, CPO Michael Del Monte, Cofounder, CTO |
Lowell Putnam
about Quovo and its offerings.The inception of Quovo
Lowell came to wealth management from the investment banking space. He worked at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, where he worked in the Financial Institutions Group with a specialization on consumer lending. In 2008, Lowell started trading stocks and became an active personal investor. This is when he faced problems tracking his own investments over time.
Then,Michael Del Monte
, who is CTO at Quovo today, began working on pulling data from websites or APIs where people had retail brokerage accounts, and then doing performance reporting for those working in the retail sector.“This [data] seemed to be a real problem. People didn’t seem to know how they were doing. And obviously in a crisis and post-crisis world it seemed very important.”This data-pulling, which started as a hobby, coincided with the start of the robo-advisor trend and the explosion of innovation in the wealth space. Once Lowell and Michael realized that they had built an interesting new platform for pulling outside account data into other platforms, which they anticipated would become a much bigger trend, they decided to join forces with
Niko Karvounis
, CPO of Quovo, and make a business out of it.“We actually thought we would be B2C [a consumer-facing business] at first. Right then, there were so many new robo-advisors starting. Trying to move into the space we realized, instead of competing with this new batch of startups, why don’t we actually service them? Why don’t we become an infrastructure player as opposed to a B2C company?”
Investments obtained
Quovo has raised more than $20M in total funding over four rounds.
In 2013, the startup raised $1.4M in Series A funding for investment analytics; the investment drive was led by Long Light Capital. At that time, Quovo had the platform in beta with users ranging from sophisticated hedge funds down to retail investors with an E*Trade account.
In 2015, Quovo closed a $4.75M funding round led by Fintech Collective. Long Light Capital participated again. Quovo offered a full-stack platform that provided aggregation and business intelligence analytics; its dashboard tools made complex data insights intuitive.
Two years later, in 2017, Quovo raised $10M in Series B funding. F-Prime Capital and Napier Park Financial Partners co-led the round. Quovo used the funds to accelerate the growth of its suite of data analytics offerings, including the bank authentication API and Quovo Connect module.
In May 2018, the company obtained $4M in investment from Salesforce Ventures and Portag3 Ventures. With partial support from the investments, Quovo has begun to partner with Canadian FinTech companies and institutions to replicate their US success in the Canadian market. Quovo’s vision is to build a regional team and accelerate innovation in Canadian FinTech. Lowell Putnam says,
“We wanted to make sure that we moved into the market with expertise, so we hired a head of Canadian strategy who’s been there for a long time and knows the market well.”
Competition
In the US, there are a number of data aggregators that help financial advisors, institutions, and FinTech companies provide their users with access to all their banking and investment data, enabling them see their finances, portfolios, and performance in one place. Quovo’s competitors include the following companies:
- Finicity, which has developed more than 16,000 bank integrations and provides a suite of APIs for financial management, payments, and credit decision making.
- Yodlee, which offers financial applications and personal financial account information for banks, entrepreneurs, and individuals. In 2015, Yodlee was purchased by Envestnet and is focused on investment data.
- Plaid, which aggregates bank transactions and provides APIs to help financial applications connect with user bank accounts.
- Morningstar’s ByAllAccounts, which provides a data-aggregation system that gathers, transforms, and delivers financial account data.
Lowell Putnam has a great deal of respect for the incumbent technology providers in the space:
“Yodlee is very competitive in the market. They’ve been around for about 20 years. They really invented the space.”
However, Lowell thinks that Quovo has a slightly different focus than the competition.
“We’re totally agnostic to what you want to use customer account data for. The more different use cases there are, the more excited I am to have our service out there.”
Lowell sees his company to have the advantage of being much younger, using other technologies, and having different cost structures.