Open Advice, a hybrid-advice platform set up to enable advisers to help close the advice gap, has raised a total £250,000 investment including £100,000 from the founders and £150,000 SEIS from Symvan Capital, a leading early stage seed and growth stage venture capital fund manager.
Launched in November 2022, Open Advice was founded by Anthony Villis and Robert Caplan, directors, B Corp financial planning company First Wealth, along with brothers Charlton and Elliott Santana. Using pioneering technology, Open Advice aims to make financial planning more accessible and digitally engaging by automating onboarding, financial planning and investing.
Open Advice plans to use the investment to support its ambitions to build an entire ecosystem that enables clients to complete tasks in one place: from accessing financial plans and managing investments to opening an ISA and generating valuations and compliance reports. Its technology can be white labelled for other advice firms.
The funding will fast-track Open Advice’s plans to help advisers build relationships with the next generation of clients, using software to automate some of the planning journey alongside data and algorithms to suggest advice based on probability of outcome, removing bias and subjectivity. As it evolves, Open Advice plans to build its evidence-based model using data for modelling to help advise clients more effectively based on their life goals. This will all be delivered via a client facing app.
Co-founder Anthony Villis says, “Open Advice is a service built by advisers for advisers and this investment will help us onboard more clients and launch additional features to become a market-leading SaaS business for the financial advice profession. I’m delighted to have Symvan on board. They are a team we know well and trust and have a proven track record for growing fintech startups. We have ambitious plans for scaling Open Advice and Symvan shares our vision. ”
Michael Theodosiou, investment manager, Symvan Capital, says: “This is an area within fintech that we know very well, having invested in other wealthtech solutions and indeed engaging with wealth managers and financial advisers whose clients invest in our funds. Open Advice is tackling a longstanding issue in the industry, which is only becoming more pronounced in an increasingly volatile and uncertain economic climate. The team brings a huge amount of knowledge and experience to bear on the problem of addressing the advice gap, understanding it intimately and from a first-hand perspective. We have also been impressed with how quickly they have brought the concept through its early development and we are excited to support them in bringing their solution to the next stage and making professional financial advice more accessible to a wider audience.”
Open Advice is already plugged into P1 Investment Services, so clients can access discretionary managed, low cost evidence based portfolios easily.
