You may have seen the news (covered here by Bloomberg, Techcrunch and The Wall Street Journal) around our investment in leading wealth management and robo-advisory platform, SigFig.
Our involvement comes as part of SigFig’s $40million funding round, with Santander InnoVentures investing alongside other big-hitters in the financial services and VC world: including UBS, Eaton Vance and Bain Capital, to name a few.
We’ve already invested in innovative companies operating across the payments, lending and distributed ledger sectors, but this is our first investment into another of Santander InnoVentures key focus areas: investment advisory.
Affordable, accessible and trustworthy financial advice is essential for the sustainable growth of the investment segment of financial services. Founder Mike Sha (the SigFig CEO) and his team understand this, and also share our views on the need to offer the best possible understanding of financial well-being to every individual, not just the wealthy.
This shared philosophy goes some way to explaining why we’re excited about the potential of SigFig as a business.
SigFig is doing exciting things in this arena, offering enterprise-level wealth management technology that’s secure and compliant, while ensuring it’s tailored to the specific needs of clients.
Mike and the SigFig team will now use the capital they have raised for a major expansion of headcount, as well as advancing the platform itself. As with all Santander InnoVentures partnerships, our commitment goes beyond simply providing capital – we’re also offering SigFig access to the know-how and expertise of Santander as a global financial institution.
For those interested in the detail, the full announcement can be found in our pressroom here: http://santanderinnoventures.com/news/pressroom/
