Saint John FinTech Company Doubled Growth In 2020
SAINT JOHN — A Saint John-based financial technology firm that helps investor and advisors to connect digitally says it doubled its growth in 2020 — and they’re on track to do it again in 2021
Four Eyes Financial offers a platform that modernizes how the financial services sector aligns an investor’s risk profile with investment products to manage regulatory and reputational risk.
“We help investors feel more confident that they’re invested in products that meet their risk tolerance and financial goals,” says Four Eye Financial’s co-founder Lori Weir.
The company got its start in 2018 when Weir, a long-time entrepreneur, was running her businesses in training and management consulting. One of her clients was Scotia Wealth in Toronto.
“During that time I saw an opportunity to improve the digital experience between advisors and their clients,” says Weir. “As an investor myself, I also felt a more interdependent relationship with my advisor would be something that I would really appreciate, and that require transparency and tools to enable that.”
So she and her life-partner, Kendall McMenamon, who is also a technology entrepreneur, started to look at what such a platform would look like.
“As entrepreneurs, I’d come back from Toronto and we’d chat and we’d talk about how could this look,” says Weir. “Eventually, we just starting building solutions and that’s kind of the genesis of the company.”
Four Eyes Financial’s products create a secure space where investors and their advisors can communicate digitally.
“We have products that give investors a client portal where they can log in and be able to see what you’re invested in and be able to talk to your advisor and schedule a meeting. You’d be able to fill out documents related to your risk and your financial objectives,” says Weir.
“Your advisor has a dashboard that our platform enables to actually communicate with you, share information with you, talk about investment products, and have the two of you take a look at them to make sure that before they make the trade that it means your requirements.”
The platform also has the ability to go higher up, to ensure compliance.
“Our platform is also enabled at the head-office level and the firm-level for their compliance team to make sure that all of these trades are being done sitting within the regulations,” says Weir. “We’re currently working on a regulator view, to enable digital audits.”
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Four Eyes Financial’s platform was available in limited release.
“We did have some enterprise clients and we were starting to get traction,” says Weir. “The nature of digital of discovery that’s between the advisor and client was something that everyone was very interested in as a ‘nice to have’ but really what happened last year is it became a ‘need to have.'”
The average age of an investment advisor in Canada is 55, and typically when there’s a choice between a digital meeting and an in-person meeting, in-person is preferred. But Covid-19 took those options off the table. As a result, Four Eyes doubled their revenue and doubled their team, growing from nine people to 19.
“I think it really accelerated decision making. The business that we’re in is not something that people make a decision in quickly,” says Weir. “It’s usually a nine-12 month sales cycle. People we had been talking to, we have been talking to previously.”
In Canada, about 80 percent of investments are done through the big six banks. Four Eyes Financial’s target customers are the other 20 percent. These are described as independent investment dealers, like Align Capital Partners, which was Four Eyes Financial’s first user.
“Certainly, there is an opportunity in the larger financial institutions, and this year we are projecting to close a couple of financial institutions,” says Weir. “Not banks, but there are others in the game. For example, insurance companies that sell investment products.”
This year the company projects to once again increase their revenue by 50 percent,
“Deals we’ve been pursuing and working through over the last six months we expect to close throughout this year,” says Weir.
They will also be hiring more team members for roles in data science, sales and marketing, and project/product management, who will work out of their office in uptown Saint John.
“One of the reasons why Kendall and I started this company is in Saint John is that we believed we had really skilled people here and there was a real opportunity to develop a new industry sector not dependant on natural resources but dependant on people and the way that the world is moving in terms of technology,” says Weir.
“Financial technology is a huge sector and in particular, wealth technology and regulatory. So to develop skills sets like that in the region we both feel is really important. It creates a lot of opportunities and it’s a huge growth sector.”