Fintel aiming to create 'Microsoft 365 of financial services' with string of acquisitions

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Mr Timmins said: “In our market, the average number of technology solutions a financial advisor uses to give advice to a client is nine. With that many different systems, the process is wholly insufficient

“What we’ve been doing is going out and acquiring the best point systems in the market, and we are integrating those together to create a seamless platform, so advisors can use one piece of software to do what they need to do.

“I think the way to think about it is something like Microsoft 365, where you have Excel, Word and Powerpoint. What we want to do is bring everything together in one environment, like 365, where you’ve got a single identity and can access all the pieces of software together in one go.”

2024 saw Fintel acquire firms Owen James, Synaptic Software and ifaDASH.

The company also acquired Manchester-based business management consultant Threesixty Services during the year, in a move Mr Timmins said had “significantly increased” Fintel’s distribution footprint. At the time of the acquisition, Threesixty served over 900 intermediary customers.

Fintel is also the parent firm of Defaqto and SimplyBiz.

Mr Timmins’s comments came as Fintel announced its 2024 financial results.

The firm saw core revenue increase to £68.9m for the year, up 22 per cent from 2023. Fintel said this was supported by revenue of £15m from its acquired portfolio.

The company also posted adjusted EBITDA growth of 8.5 per cent to £22.2m. It said this came after investment to expand products, services and capabilities.

The group saw pre-tax profit drop from £9.6m in 2023 to £7.7m last year. It said this was due to non-recurring costs including an over £4m investment in merger and acquisition costs and a “once every five year” share scheme pay-out of £5m.

Mr Timmins said that though Fintel was planning to further its use of AI, it did not plan to make any acquisitions in the area.

He said: “I think, clearly, AI is going to become a massively important part of what we do as a fintech provider to the market.

“I think what we will continue to do is invest into AI across the whole business and train all our staff in AI, rather than trying to acquire an AI business or bring in a big subject matter expert. We believe AI will become business as normal, so everyone in the organisation needs to get up to speed.

“We believe that the answer to AI lies within the strength of the data architecture in your business, so we're busy spending a lot of time and money to make sure we have the most robust data architecture we can have, so when you bolt on AI to that data architecture, its in the right place."