OpenFin has raised USD17 million in Series C funding from major banks and leading Fintech investors. The funding round was led by Wells Fargo with participation from Barclays and existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures, JP Morgan and Pivot Investment Partners.
The Series C round brings OpenFin’s total amount of venture funding to USD40 million. Proceeds from the financing will be used to make OpenFin OS ubiquitous on financial desktops and to fund further product innovation. This includes OpenFin’s new Cloud Services offering, which enables banks, asset managers, wealth managers and hedge funds to provide their own private app stores for employees and customers out of the box.
The global financial services industry is spending billions in addressing the digital transformation of thousands of legacy desktop applications used for client service centres, front office, operations, risk and compliance. OpenFin’s widely adopted desktop operating system enables financial services firms to build new applications with modern web technology while enabling seamless and secure integration with legacy applications. This allows these firms to modernise and unify the end-user desktop experience while extracting the greatest possible value from their existing technology investments.
“Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems and app stores have enabled more than a million apps that have fundamentally changed how we live,” says Mazy Dar (pictured), CEO and Co-Founder of OpenFin. “OpenFin OS and our new app store services enable the next generation of desktop apps that are transforming how we work in financial services.”
OpenFin OS has become a de facto market standard for deployment and interoperability of desktop apps to power digital transformation across the industry. Its customers include most major banks, leading asset management firms and many of the best known vendor platforms in the space. The operating system software runs more than 1,000 applications at more than 1,500 banks and buy-side firms across 200,000 desktops in 60+ countries.
“We have been following OpenFin’s progress and are impressed by the company’s success in gaining wide adoption in capital markets. OpenFin is leading a key effort in providing the financial industry with a modern and unifying foundation for development and secure distribution of financial applications,” says Basil Darwish, Managing Director, Strategic Investments at Wells Fargo Securities. “We are delighted to lead OpenFin’s Series C funding round and excited to support the next phase of their development.”
“Agility and interoperability are core pillars of our digital strategy because time is a precious resource, especially in a banking environment. OpenFin accelerates our innovation cycle and allows us to create better workflows, enabling our colleagues and clients to make more productive use of their time,” says Brett Tejpaul, Head of Digital and Client Strategy at Barclays Investment Bank. “We are pleased to support the company which is a leader in the industry with its open source model and its commitment to industry collaboration.”
“OpenFin is building the roads, bridges and communications infrastructure for financial apps that will allow capital markets to innovate like Silicon Valley,” says Matt Harris, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “We are proud to have been early backers of the company and we welcome the strategic support from Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo.”
OpenFin has significant network effects in financial services as a result of its wide adoption which, in turn, is fuelling innovation and accelerating a generational shift in how applications are developed, distributed and maintained. The company also sees tremendous opportunities for their technology in adjacent industries.