The new digital financial services company Alpian SA (“Alpian”), incubated by the Swiss banking group REYL & Cie Ltd (“REYL”), today announced a successful Series B funding worth around USD18 million(CHF16.9 million). The fundraising followsthe Series A round in 2020 in which CHF12.2million was raised.
According to Alpian CEO Schuyler Weiss:
“Alpian takes a structured and careful approach to building and launching the bank. While the Series A fundraising was conducted to build the digital bank, the Series B fundraising is intended to be principally used to launch the bank in the Swiss market. This approach ensures that Alpian will be in a strong position to provide the best service to customers later this year subject to the issuance of a full banking licence by FINMA.”
With its integrated offering of both banking and investing inside a single convenient product experience, Alpian is pursuing a market segment of mass affluent clients; individuals with anywhere from CHF100,000 to 1,000,000 to invest. Accordingto research undertakenby Alpian, mass affluent clients are typicallyun- der-served by retail banks and lack access to private bankingservices. In Switzerland alone, the segmentof potential mass affluent investors represents a CHF660billion opportunity.
Through a combination of machine intelligence and human advisors, Alpian aims to create for each clienta unique portfolio that is aligned to their personal preferences, beliefs, philosophies and goals. This hybrid model, which combines state of the art bankingand investing infrastructure with qualified wealthmanage- ment advisors, will enable mass affluent clients to access a service normally reserved for clients of private banks. Besides the core private banking offering, each account will come with a debit card and multi-cur- rency account in four currencies to facilitate everyday banking needs. Alpian is also investing in the crea- tion of educational contenton financial mattersthrough its recentlylaunched i-vest platform.
