LAB Group partners with Costa Asset Management in private equity deal
Australia’s leading financial services KYC & Onboarding platform provider, LAB Group, has completed its first-ever capital raise to form a private equity partnership with Costa Asset Management (CAM).
CAM is a Victorian-based Family Office. As a part of the transaction, CAM CEO, Liza Whitmore, has joined the Board of LAB Group.
Of the new partnership, Liza commented, “There is a growing need for LAB Group’s product, and we support the management team’s strategy. As the demand for KYC services grows, LAB Group has demonstrated they have the capability and the solution to capitalise on market conditions in a profitable way.”
LAB Group was co-founded in 2010 by its CEO Nick Boudrie and CTO Lyndon Webster, who retain majority stakes in the business. Since its launch, LAB Group has deployed its technology across Australian and New Zealand financial services licensees and other overseas businesses whilst establishing offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Copenhagen. The business, that provides a highly standardised Software-as-a-Service, LABform, landed its first major institutional client in 2012 – digitising onboarding for cash accounts, term deposits, online trading, and business banking products – this was ahead of signing agreements with a large and diverse market share of online broker and share trading businesses such as SelfWealth, stockbrokers, superannuation funds and asset managers including Hostplus and Lazard. During its growth, LAB Group has been partnering and integrating with organisations including Link Fund Solutions, a fund administrator, and OpenMarkets, who provides wholesale trading, clearing and settlement services, portfolio management technology providers and popular CRMs like Salesforce. Organisations are leveraging the platform to fully digitise their integrated investor journey offerings to clients.
In Australia, LAB Group has captured a large proportion of investors and financial advisers engaging into products through online channels. It has rolled out its solution that is multi-country and integrates into a range of identity service providers and is starting to work with enterprise level clients on plans to deploy the solution further into Asia, Europe and the United States.
Known as a financial services and regulatory services technology provider (FinTech and RegTech) and after a stellar organic performance that saw over 300% volume growth through 2020 due to accelerating COVID-19 driven digitisation and the resurgence of online trading, LAB Group will utilise the additional capital to further drive platform deployment, integrations, servicing and product roadmap in a constantly evolving regulatory landscape.
Nick Boudrie comments on the investment saying, “The backing of an investor of the calibre and reach of Costa Asset Management will be hugely supportive as we expand and consolidate our offering in Australia and set up the foundations to expand more globally.”
Nick goes onto say, “The deal reinforces the uniqueness of LAB Group’s offering and positioning in this space due to its wide range of functionality that consolidates identity solutions whilst servicing direct-to-consumer and adviser channels. Because we are agnostic and pre-integrated to many suppliers and technologies that are key to fulfilling accounts, LABform enables end-to-end account origination leveraging a standardised data model on top of a single build platform that is constantly upgraded across its customer base to satisfy Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations and to align with innovation trends.”
