RankiaPro Magazine Interviews Fundpath CEO Jamie Hinchliffe
Fundpath CEO Jamie Hinchliffe recently sat down for a Q&A session with RankiaPro magazine. The full interview is published below.
We (RankiaPro) interviewed Jamie Hinchliffe, CEO & Co-Founder of Fundpath. Prior to co-founding Fundpath, Jamie Hinchliffe was the Group Managing Director and Co-Founder of Last Word Media, a global B2B financial media, publishing, data, research, and events business.
Can you tell us about the background to Fundpath? Why did you set up the firm, and what do you hope to achieve?
Fundpath was founded in 2021 with a single objective – to enable a better, more effective, and efficient marketplace for fund buyers and sellers.
Our founders, who combine decades of experience in this industry, observed an information disconnect within investment distribution: buyers of funds (typically wealth management firms in the UK) were receiving a high volume of irrelevant, often unsolicited communications from asset managers, due to a lack of data and business intelligence. Asset management distribution teams often had limited insight into the buying intentions and mechanics of their clients, leading to inefficient and misdirected sales and marketing outreach.
It was evident to us that efficiencies on both sides of fund distribution could be significantly improved. Fundpath acts as an information nexus across the investment distribution ecosystem, enabling the sharing of relevant data and business intelligence for better outcomes.
After recently achieving the double milestone of passing the 100-client mark and securing six million pounds in funding, and looking back to the beginning, how did Fundpath manage to secure its first clients? And how did you raise capital in the early stages?
Fundpath’s founders are seasoned entrepreneurs, who successfully launched and exited Last Word Media, a global financial B2B company, which operated in 24 countries. Our industry knowledge, experience, and connections meant that we were well-acquainted with the ‘information disconnect’ – the problem Fundpath now solves.
Further research with multiple industry stakeholders gave us a far stronger conviction in our idea. Initial investment came from our existing networks; this enabled Fundpath to launch and to demonstrate proof of concept. We then approached venture capital groups to drive the next stage of development. Fuel Ventures, our VC partner, has to-date invested £6 million in the firm.
Who benefits from Fundpath? How do Fundpath’s clients benefit from its services?
Everyone involved in fund distribution benefits from Fundpath.
Fundpath was created, and continues to be developed, in partnership with the fund buying and selling community. Fund selectors – usually working within wealth management, discretionary fund management, and IFA organisations – share business information, current interests, and future intentions on Fundpath. Our central, secure platform delivers this insight to our clients, who sell funds i.e. asset managers. This helps them better tailor their sales and marketing outreach for relevance, leading to fruitful conversations at the outset.
Ultimately, this value exchange, which Fundpath enables, streamlines the fund distribution process, saving time and money on both sides. Asset management sales, marketing and data teams benefit from access to our data and business intelligence, which now covers the addressable market within the UK, Channel Islands and the Republic of Ireland, with more than 9,200 wealth management professionals and 1,040 firms in the Fundpath Knowledge Bank. Our platform tracks real-time industry changes, and our proprietary insight enables our clients to position their products in a relevant and timely manner. Our platform also offers highly customisable audience curation, enabling tailor-made sales and marketing campaigns.
What are the main advantages of Fundpath? How can Fundpath help to develop the investment industry?
Fundpath enables a seamless transfer of verified, current, and relevant information from fund buyers to fund sellers. This information transfer enables both wealth and asset managers to save time and money in perpetuity. Asset managers gain deeper market coverage, better insight into their customers’ needs, and can tailor their communications appropriately, resulting in an improved sales process. In turn, wealth managers find that communication from asset managers is more relevant to their stated preferences and match the specific requirements of their businesses.
Investment distribution is a constantly shifting landscape of people, markets, and sentiment. Fundpath’s rigorous data-led approach means that we are fast becoming a critical service, a single source of truth for the industry.
Why do you think Fundpath has attracted such mass market interest, from both the investment community and the investment professionals?
Fundpath provides a truly unique service, which is proving invaluable to the entire investment ecosystem. We are contributing to real progress in our industry – making opportunities visible and possible through proprietary insight and business intelligence. Our business is gaining traction, with over 100 asset management organisations – from Tier 1 asset managers through to boutiques – in the UK (a significant majority of the market) now onboarded as clients.
What is it about Fundpath that you think attracted VC investment?
We’ve successfully demonstrated proof of concept, by securing more than 100 asset management clients in two years. We’ve also enjoyed a groundswell of industry support, seeing phenomenal buy-in from both our clients as well as our wealth management partners. The feedback on both sides has provided us with irrefutable evidence that we’re leading a market transformation. We have before us a huge opportunity to positively impact an important industry, by solving a genuine problem through technology and data. Our investors received outstanding feedback from wealth and asset managers about what Fundpath is creating, and the scale of progress made in such a short time was enough to convince them to be part of the journey.
What next for Fundpath?
We are extremely excited about the next phase of Fundpath’s growth, providing the industry with ever smarter solutions and further improving professional lives. We will continue to deploy capital received earlier this year to accelerate our product roadmap, expand our services and try and attract the very best people.
