Canopy Offers Transparency to High Net Worth Individual’s Portfolios

“I don’t know what they want from me

It’s like the more money we come across

The more problems we see”

– Mo Money Mo Problems, The Notorious B.I.G

Founded in 2013, Canopy offers account aggregation, portfolio analytics, and client reporting to firms that manage the money of high net worth individuals (HNIs), family offices, and external asset managers (EAMs). And while the company wasn’t directly influenced by Kelly Price’s chorus on the classic Notorious B.I.G. song, the fintech startup and 90’s anthem express similar sentiments.

For Biggie Smalls, new found riches brought about new problems. Similarly, for HNIs, the large portfolios they often command create their own unique challenges. These giant portfolios are constructed to diversify risk across multiple asset classes, but in doing so, create a complex web of investments across geographies that can be tough to track. That’s where Canopy, a Singapore-based startup that offers a B2B2C platform specifically tailored for the management of HNI’s investments and running unlimited configurable analytics, comes in.

To understand what Canopy does, it’s helpful to understand a bit about the state of financial data globally. While in the U.S. it seems standard these days for banks to make their data accessible via digital APIs, this isn’t the case for many other places in the world. In countries (including European and Asian countries) still in the early days of their digital transformation, as much as 80% of transaction data is moved via more old-fashioned methods, like PDFs.

Beyond antiquated methods for circulating data, there’s also a mind-boggling variety of performance calculation methodologies and of ways data can be formatted. Just think of how dates are reported in various areas of the world. Applying this variability to financial forms and reporting leads to thousands of data formats which differs by bank or internal department.

Canopy CTO, Amit Gupta

Within these two problems is where Canopy operates, per CTO Amit Gupta. The 6-year-old startup is able to ingest the data in various formats (including PDFs via their artificial intelligence solution), analyze and extract the relevant information, and aggregate it into a user-friendly view, all with pinpoint accuracy.

“Our team boasts the ability to reconcile multi-decimal variances between banks without the need for a human to touch it. And since we’re dealing with financial data, there is an extremely slim margin for error.”

For HNIs and such customers, this means they can finally get an overarching view of where they hold their assets and how each is performing on a day to day basis instead of looking at it every 45 days.

As for how Canopy reaches this target market, the company has taken an approach of selling their platform to the banks that provide financial advisory to HNIs. These partners include names like the Bank of Singapore, Julius Baer-SCB, and Credit Suisse, who Canopy counts both as an investor and first customer.

Throughout the process of building and scaling the company, Canopy turned to AWS to save them time and allow them focus on needle-moving activities. As Gupta puts it, “We turned to the cloud because, as a startup, we need to invest our energy into the core product. By leveraging AWS, we’re able to offload many tasks that are valuable, but may not necessarily apply directly to our core offering. Along with that, the partnership gives us access to an entire ecosystem that’s a unique in the industry.”

So, what’s next for Canopy? With roughly $15 million in funding raised from both venture firms and strategics, the company has its eyes set on further geographic expansion and penetration, especially across Europe.

Per Gupta, “We’ve made good headway in the European market, but are looking forward to progressing to own a larger chunk. Beyond that, we’ll likely move into the US, a country that we haven’t concentrated on to-date but have an eye on as 40% of world’s wealth lies there ready to be served.”