Member spotlight - Flinks

Meet Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, Co-founder and CEO of Flinks

Tell us a little about your organization.
 
Flinks brings open finance to the people and businesses who want it. As such, we are the financial data layer powering the internet.
 
We’re trusted by millions of individuals to securely share their financial information from the institutions that hold their accounts to the third-party providers of their choice.
 
We enable businesses to connect to their customers' financial accounts, enrich this data, and utilize it to deliver better digital products. Serving innovators in lending, fintech, regtech, digital banking, asset management and insurance, we’re quickly becoming a global leader in financial data connectivity and analytics.

Who are your clients and what types of regulatory challenges are they facing?
                        
Flinks serves both start-ups and corporations from all sectors of financial services, across North America.
 
From a regulatory & consumer perspective, we help our clients by providing digital access to data that improves their understanding of their end users for risk assessment, income detection, and fraud reduction.
 
From an institutional perspective, we help clients by providing an automated solution for compliance to be able to digitally report employee trading and investments that are subjected to disclosure requirements.
 
By providing digital access to retail and investments data, Flinks eliminates potential costly human input errors, improves fraud detection activity and increases productivity by automating the compliance function of statement acquisitions and reviews.
 
Regardless of the use case, the digitization of financial services has brought a set of challenges including, among other things:
 
●maintaining high levels of KYC and AML regulatory compliance
●ensuring the protection of consumers’ data
●ensuring credit risk is properly assessed and mitigated
●delivering fair, non-discriminatory products and services
 
Flinks has been a leading voice in favor of consumers' ownership of their personal financial data, and we’ve made meaningful contributions to the government’s efforts to define open finance for our country.
 
 
As an emerging technology provider what do you think will have the greatest impact on your business and/or industry?
 
Open finance levels the playing field in financial services by making it quick, secure and easy for consumers to share their financial information with third parties, thus paving the way for greater competition and consumer choice. It’s also been our long-held belief that financial data connectivity should tend to become a commodity, further removing the barrier of cost.
 
That being said, access to financial data is just a start.
 
The next evolution will be data enrichment and analytics tools that firms of all sizes—not just those with deep pockets—can use to turn raw data into insights used in their products and services. To illustrate that with an example: imagine being able to share all the information and documents in real time which can automatically alert a compliance team to post-trade activity in an automated fashion.  Enrichment tools and analytics can be used to make archaic processes simpler and more effective by delivering simple changes in a workflow or replace manual processes with data and analytic driven solutions.
 
This kind of technology will unlock the potential of open finance in regard to financial inclusion, personalization of your banking experience, real-time fraud detection, and more.
 
Why did you join the CRTA? How do you think the CRTA will help your business (industry)?
 
We joined the CRTA to further our participation in the regulatory ecosystem. We want to help ensure businesses of all sizes have access to the right products that help them serve their customers better while ensuring the protection of customers’ data rights & privacy to remain compliant with industry regulation. Dialog among all stakeholders is key to ensure that innovation and regulation go hand in hand.