Bud, an Open Banking Fintech established in 2015, recently completed its Series B round totaling $80 million.
Bellis Phantom Holdco ltd, an indirect affiliate of investment funds managed by TDR Capital LLP, is reportedly the largest investor and has been followed by SEI investments along with other existing investors such as Outward VC.
The Series B investment round demonstrates the value of Bud’s innovative tech, which has been based on transactional AI models that allow financial institutions to personalize digital products and automate lending decisions.
The capital injection will be used to develop/refine Bud’s models and support global expansion, while allowing Bud to address the requirements of its client portfolio.
Bud’s intelligent Open Banking platform is reportedly being used by clients such as ANZ, Street UK and TotallyMoney in order to automate affordability checks, which previously were requiring lending teams to spend many hours looking through transaction data and bank statements.
Other large-scale organizations, such as HSBC and Credit Karma, are now using Bud’s tech in order to help clients better understand their finances by offering meaningful data insights and personalized actions.
This allows Bud to connect consumers with better, more personalized financial services such as rewards-based products and insurance, supported by advanced encryption services to keep their data secure.
Bud has differentiated in the current market with its ability to create a highly accurate picture/view of a client’s finances by understanding “messy” or complicated transaction data.
Bud Co-Founder and CEO, Ed Maslaveckas, said:
“Bellis sees real value in the technology and use cases we have developed. Bud’s transactional intelligence services allow applications to become truly personalised for the first time. For example, our lending customers can expect to see an increase of about 85% in capacity by combining open banking data with our AI capabilities in their affordability assessments.
Ed added:
“Over the past three years we have been developing this core technology, which has now reached a level of transaction enrichment which is 33% more accurate than industry leaders. The extensive investment in our technology has paid dividends, enabling us to enter a new market and get to over 93% accuracy in just six weeks.”
As noted in the update, TDR Capital LLP is a private equity fund manager that oversees funds making long term investments and work with management teams to support multi-year growth.
Gary Lindsay, Managing Partner at TDR Capital remarked:
“We are hugely excited by the potential of Bud, not only in the ability of its platform to truly harness the opportunities from open banking, but also in its far-reaching potential to help power other businesses we are invested in. The effective integration of technology and data science has long been a core part of TDR’s operational strategy and this investment is consistent with that approach.”
Bud’s Series B has been finalized after its $20 million Series A back in 2019, which saw Goldman Sachs, HSBC and ANZ back the firm’s vision for tech automation of complex financial data.