The finance industry is riddled with high maintenance legacy IT systems and processes. Increased regulation is creating demand for specialized, flexible systems with lower maintenance costs. Sharpfin, a Swedish company, is tackling the issue of legacy systems in wealth management, while Finland-based Invesdor is doing the same in equity and bond offerings.

The two fintech firms have now partnered up to raise equity crowdfunding for Sharpfin. The company, which develops and delivers modern wealth management software for banks, financial advisors, asset managers and family offic­es, is raising up to SEK 5 million via Invesdor’s crowdfunding platform.

“The finance industry has, for too long, been satisfied high maintenance, legacy systems. However, due to increased regulation, higher demands on flexibility and pressure on administrative costs the future demands efficient, flexible software. The future needs Sharpfin,” says Sharpfin CEO and Co-founder, Markus Alin.

Prior to Sharpfin, Alin was software architect at Credit Suisse Asset Management, management at fintech firm Swissrisk AG and CEO at portfolio management system provider Triental AB. He founded Sharpfin together with a colleague from Triental, Billy Svensson. Svensson has worked as programmer and as software architect roles at various projects with banks and insurance companies such as SEB, Nordnet, Swedbank and Folksam and as an entrepreneur. Sharpfin’s board of directors includes Heiner Weber, former Executive Vice President of Lombard Odier, and Marcus Ek, Head of Contract Management at Ericsson in the Middle Eastern and African region.

For Invesdor, Sharpfin’s equity offering is one of its first moves into the Swedish market. Invesdor currently operates in Finland, the UK, Denmark and Norway. Since 2012, it has helped 93 growth companies raise funding from investors of more than 70 nationalities.

“I know from my experience as a Portfolio Manager in London that the asset management and wealth management firms are under pressure,” says Peter Moore, Equity Director at Invesdor. “Compliance requirements are increasing and fees are decreasing, but the systems are still out of the 90s. Sharpfin has the technology, the people and the network to take advantage of this changing industry.”

“We believe that crowdfunding is the future of investments. Having many investors investing smaller portions make their investment portfolios more diverse,” says Markus Alin. “This is in line with the very essence of our vision. We even have parts of the measure for risk adjusted performance in our company name, ‘the Sharpe ratio’.”

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This is one of the first times in the Nordic region that the general public can invest with a venture capital fund with the same commercial terms. With this modern and digital approach, Transfluent, along with its investors, sets a standard for other fundraisers to follow.

Transfluent’s self-serving and extremely scalable platform has disrupted the way businesses use translation services. The platform was originally tailored for the rapid needs of social-media powered global business and comes with a powerful API that allows integration of translation services to virtually any platform. Today Transfluent’s human-powered and high-quality translations cover all types of content for more than 400+ different companies in a variety of industries. Some of the biggest customers include Cap Gemini, Pfizer, Pinterest, Tieto, Visma and Elisa.

Transfluent is especially strong in business translations, with a range of specialist translators catering to creative marketing translations to sensitive legal documents. Most of Transfluent’s current business comes from large enterprise customers, but the service is well suited for businesses of all sizes and types.

An interesting niche that Transfluent dominates in Finland is the country’s successful game development industry. There is a huge demand globally for game translations, particularly in East Asia and China, and Transfluent is exceptionally well positioned to attack the lucrative market.

“Our near term target is to become the largest translation company in Finland in the next 2-3 years. At the same time, we already have international customers and we are preparing to expand operations internationally. Our long term business goal is to be the world’s first translation company to have global annual revenues of over €1 billion,” Transfluent founder and CEO Jani Penttinen says.

Jari Tuovinen, Founder & Partner of Vision+ says, says, “Since most translation companies share the same professional translator resources, the key differentiator is the technology platform and the API connectivity for placing orders and managing translations. This is where Transfluent is miles ahead of the competition.”

Using the online interface, customers can submit material to be translated, follow progress in real time, send messages to the translators and access the history of their past translations. This can save up to weeks compared to traditional translation agencies.

The Transfluent API allows deep integration into the enterprise tools already in use. Examples of successful integrations include customer support systems and large ecommerce websites, where thousands of translation tasks may need to be handled daily.

“The business model works. For the past two years, Transfluent’s product revenue has been growing an average 8% month-to-month (2.5x annual increase) and the growth rate has recently been increasing. This is a very exciting and interesting story and we are happy to be part of it at Invesdor,” says Lasse Mäkelä, CEO of Invesdor.

Jani Penttinen says, “In fact, the combination of speed and quality is not only serving existing translation needs better, it is opening new markets where translation was previously not considered possible. Instead of hiring a customer service team who speaks dozens of languages, you can now have a team of English-speaking customer service agents responding to customers in virtually all the world’s languages.”

Globally, translation industry generated about €37 billion in 2016. The industry is growing at about 7% per year. The largest global translation companies, Lionbridge and Transperfect, command about 1% share of the total industry revenue.

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