Communify, a company owned by Just Build It (JBI), a software investment firm launched earlier this year by former InvestCloud founder John Wise, has acquired Fincentric, a developer of mobile apps and websites for brokerages with retail and other financial institutions, from S&P Global. Communify is making the investment alongside Stelex Capital Management, a New York-based private equity firm.
The two companies will come together to create Communify Fincentric, a digital platform that will include markets apps and client and advisor apps. It will be focused on the global wealth and asset management industry, and Wise will serve as chairman and CEO, according to a release.
When Wise and some of his InvestCloud colleagues launched JBI, they were thinking about what it meant to treat an individual as part of a community and give them access to certain data they could share, with permissions and appropriate controls. For the last year or so, Communify's engineering efforts have been focused on security and permissions around that customer data.
The next step would be to integrate that customer data with market data. This is what Communify Fincentric will aim to do.
“It's really bringing together customer data and market data into one delivery tool, whether you're the end customer or the advisor,” Wise said.
Because the company has access to all this data, it can create knowledge bases, or information repositories, against which artificial intelligence can be pitted against.
Fincentric, formerly Markit on Demand, serves more than half of the top online brokerages in the United States. The combined company will offer both off-the-shelf products and custom tools for large organizations.
“(Fincentric's) numbers speak for themselves—their product receives 165 million hits per month, accessing over 563 million page views per day while leveraging 4,000 unique data sources,” Wise said in a statement. “The unification of Fincentric's market data capabilities with Communify's customer data expertise creates a strong digital partner for financial markets. Our shared customer-centric, design-centric mindset will be essential as we aim to grow Communify Fincentric domestically and around the world.”
While many Tier 1 clients use Fincentric, Wise sees a big opportunity to move into the middle market, defined as wealth management firms with $1 billion to $75 billion in assets.
“They can't afford to spend millions of dollars on customization, but they would love that service if it was produced,” he said. “We're going to make it a total productized platform for customer data, market data and communities, and we're going to push that together so we can address America's middle markets.”
Wise also has international ambitions, with an existing office in Australia and plans to expand to London and Singapore.
In April 2023, the wealth technology platform InvestCloud announced a change of senior managementwith co-founder and CEO Wise leaving the company and Richard Lumb, a director on the company's board of directors, serving as interim CEO. In January, Jeffery Yabukichairman and founding partner of Motive Partners, one of InvestCloud's private equity owners, was named chairman and CEO.