Financial planning software provider Midwinter acquires fellow fintech InvestmentLink
Financial planning software provider Midwinter has announced today that it has completed its transaction to acquire InvestmentLink, further developing its operations in line with its strategy.
About InvestmentLink
InvestmentLink is Australia’s largest independent datafeed repository that fully services the Australian financial planning market. The InvestmentLink service contains over 4.4 million client accounts across more than 300 superannuation and managed funds with a total balance of over $40 billion—managed by 12 000 advisers for more than 200 dealer groups.
- InvestmentLink supplies platform transaction data on a next day basis, allowing a single-page view of the client (including managed funds, unit pricing, shares and cash products).
InvestmentLink was founded in 1993 from the need for wealth managers and advisers to have a streamlined and efficient mechanism for the delivery and consolidation of wealth management information.
Following the deal, Midwinter has announced new leadership roles:
- Julian Plummer, Managing Director of InvestmentLink, will assume the leadership role.
- Salvador Saiz, Head of Institutional Growth, will maintain key relationships with platforms and datafeed clients.
Strategic focus
The newly appointed Managing Director of InvestmentLink, Julian Plummer said “Midwinter identified that the InvestmentLink datafeed service will be a crucial component of the future advice landscape, given that the impending Open Banking legislation completely ignores superannuation products. Additionally, we have found many of our digital superannuation fund clients prefer not to implement any systems where their members are required to share credentials to banking portals”.
Applications to transformation projects and Midwinter’s upcoming API strategy
Plummer went on to say “when Midwinter reviewed the AdviceOS roadmap late last year, it identified several of those roadmap items meant acquiring InvestmentLink. We intend to create one comprehensive research API service that provides transactions and balances for investment options (provided by InvestmentLink), research for those investment options, associated platform research and associated insurance research. This is only possible if we bring datafeeds in-house.”
“Bringing the InvestmentLink service in-house has a number of benefits for our advisers, including the ability for Midwinter to apply pressure to platforms to increasing their resources to their datafeed teams and allowing the InvestmentLink datafeeds to be accessed via Midwinter’s AdviceOS API. It also allows Midwinter to increase the amount of resources to the InvestmentLink service impacting the depth and breadth of its datafeeds.”
Applications to digital advice
“With the increasing popularity of Midwinter’s Digital Advice Platform, we have also identified several benefits for licensees for providing an integrated datafeed service for their digital transformations. These benefits include providing a single-page view of the client and being able to recreate member statements across multiple platforms in real time.”
Transaction details
- Financial details of the transaction are not disclosed.
- The InvestmentLink acquisition was completed 10th May 2019.
- The majority of InvestmentLink staff will be retained, and the technology and teams will be consolidated over time.
- Midwinter co-founders James Murphy, Andrew McClelland and Julian Plummer have been appointed to the InvestmentLink board.
