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 applications and websites for retail brokerages and other financial institutions, from S&P Global. Communify is making the investment alongside Stellex Capital Management, a New York-based private equity firm.
The two companies will merge to create Communify Fincentric, a digital platform that will include markets applications and client and advisor apps. It will be geared toward the global wealth and asset management industries, and Wise will serve as chairman and CEO, according to an announcement.
When Wise and a few of his InvestCloud colleagues launched JBI, they were thinking about what it would mean to treat an individual as part of a community and give them access to certain data that they could share, with the proper permissions and controls. For the last year or so, Communify’s engineering efforts have focused on the security and permissions around that client data.
The next step would be to integrate that client data with market data. That’s what Communify Fincentric will aim to do.
“It’s really the unification of client data and market data into one delivery vehicle, whether you’re the end client or the advisor,” Wise said.
Because the company has access to all this data, it can create knowledge bases, or repositories of information, that artificial intelligence can run 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 customized tools for large organizations.
“[Fincentric’s] numbers speak for themselves—their product gets 165 million logins per month, accessing over 563 million pageviews per day whilst leveraging 4,000 unique data feeds,” Wise said, in a statement. “Unifying Fincentric’s market data capabilities with Communify's expertise in client data creates a strong digital partner for the financial markets. Our shared client-centric, design-centric mindset will be pivotal as we look to grow Communify Fincentric domestically and worldwide.”
While a lot of Tier 1 clients use Fincentric, Wise sees a big opportunity to move into the mid-market, defined as wealth management firms with between $1 billion to $75 billion in assets.
“They can’t afford to spend millions of dollars on customization, but they would like that service if it was productized,” he said. “We will make it a total productized platform for client data, market data and communities and push it together so we can address the mid-markets of America.”
Wise also has international ambitions, with an existing office in Australia and plans to expand into London and Singapore.
In April 2023, wealth technology platform InvestCloud announced a senior management shakeup, with co-founder and CEO Wise exiting the company and Richard Lumb, a director on the company’s board of directors, serving as interim CEO. In January, Jeffery Yabuki, chairman and founding partner of Motive Partners, one of the private equity owners of InvestCloud, was named chairman and CEO.
