The business, called Flanks, has appointed a former FNZ senior figure to build up the Germany, Austria and Switzerland market,as well as supporting growth in the UK.

Flanks, a Barcelona-based wealth management automation platform, has set its sights on the “DACH” market of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. 

As part of the move, it has appointed ex-FNZ senior figure Sebastian Henrichs as chief operating officer, who has experience from board positions across Germany, Luxembourg, and the UK.

At FNZ, Henrichs led FNZ Germany's €120 billion ($140.5 billion) platform. Besides the DACH countries, he will also support growth in the UK. 

The firm’s technology connects financial institutions with more than 400 international custodians and private banks, extracting and standardising client wealth data through multiple aggregation methods. 

The business said data aggregation is reshaping how wealth management operates in Europe, particularly as a younger generation of HNW individuals rises to the fore. 

"DACH wealth management is sitting on a goldmine of data it can't use,” Henrichs said. "Family offices track assets across 20-plus custodians but lack unified views. The industry talks about AI, but without clean data, it's just talk.”

“Flanks' impressive team and technology platform changes that equation. We're building the high-quality data and automation foundation making AI innovation and next-generation wealth management possible. I couldn't be more excited to lead this transformation,” he said. 

Flanks is a regulated Account Information Service Provider (AISP), combining bank-grade security and GDPR compliance with a traditional European slant on trust in wealth management.

Founded in 2019 in Barcelona by Joaquim de la Cruz, Sergi Lao, and Álvaro Morales – former global head of Santander Private Banking – Flanks processes over 500,000 portfolios monthly across more than 15 countries, managing assets worth more than €39 billion. WealthBriefing carried an article from Morales in April this year.

Among other features, Flanks operates as a B2B software-as-a-service solution, targeting banks, family offices and other tech solutions such as portfolio trackers. It contains three elements: Flanks Aggregate, which connects to financial institutions to gather data; Flanks Boost, which enriches, validates, and reconciles the data; and Flanks Deliver, which presents the data through reporting and visualisation.