Bud nabs $80m Series B for international expansion later this year

Open banking provider Bud has secured $80m in funding from TDR Capital.

The fintech plans to grow its client portfolio, develop its models and build on its international expansion.

Bud secured its accreditation and began operations in Australia earlier this year, having received backing from ANZ, among other big bank investors, in its $20m Series A round in 2019.

Back then the intelligent open banking platform also saw investments from Goldman Sachs and HSBC, though none have been involved in the round this time around. 

Though Ed Maslaveckas,Bud’s co-founder and CEO, could not share exactly where the company plans to expand next, he said that before the end of the year it hopes to be in two major new markets.

“We think there’s a huge need for our services in lots of markets,” Maslaveckas told AltFi.

“There's lots of open banking aggregation players, but there's very few people that have built really good data intelligence, and what we are allowing for is for businesses that work with existing aggregators to use our intelligence services.”

The fintech is currently used by customers including ANZ, Street UK and TotallyMoney to automate affordability checks that previously required manual searching through translation data and bank statements.

Other organisations, such as HSBC and Credit Karma, use the technology to provide data insights and personalised actions to their customers to help improve their finances.

“We want to be building a valuable company and we want to be aiming high. This round helps us to get there,” Maslaveckas said.

“We want to let the world know that we move differently in the open banking space.”

The company said that combining open banking data with its AI capabilities will allow lending customers to see an increase of around 85 per cent in capacity in their affordability assessments.

It has also said that having spent the last three years developing its core technology, it is now able to enter a new market and reach 93 per cent accuracy in just six weeks.

“When you think about the open banking landscape, we kind of see ourselves as number one when it comes to the data intelligence and machine learning element of that,” he said.

“If you look at the big dynamics in the open banking space, you’ve got players like Tink and Plaid who’ve gone after connectivity [...] and you’ve got players like TrueLayer who have gone after payments.”

“This is the biggest bet that has been placed on someone who’s going after the intelligence piece.”