10x Future Technologies announced the completion of an oversubscribed $187 million Series C financing round, co-led by funds managed by BlackRock and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and supported by existing investors J.P. Morgan, Nationwide, Ping An and Westpac.
The London-based technology company will use the funding to support its expansion plans into new markets, including North America, as well as further investment into the development of the cloud native 10x SuperCore platform.
“With our microservices architecture and API-first design, our platform has been purposefully designed to enable the world’s largest banks to transform their customer experience and economics. Our vision is to reliably support more than one billion of their customers within the next 10 years,” said Antony Jenkins, founder, chair and chief exec of 10x Future Technologies, in a statement. Jenkins is also the former group CEO of Barclays.
Banks are facing increasingly complex sets of internal and external changes, such as the cost of managing and maintaining restrictive legacy technology stacks, fragmented data and launching new products and services quickly. This is compounded by competition and innovation disruption by incumbents and challengers, regulatory reform, low interest rates and capital requirements. Meanwhile, customers are demanding financial services which match the usability of the other digital products that have become central to their lives.
BlackRock’s head of Innovation Capital, William Abecassis, said in a statement: “We have been impressed with 10x’s strategy and ambition to play a key role at the heart of transformations taking place in financial services, driven by technology innovation, consumer expectations and regulatory reform. We are excited to be investing in the business as it scales into new markets.”
Leon Pedersen, managing director and head of Thematic Investing at CPP Investments, said in a statement: “10x is very well placed to change how big banks are built and deliver for their customers…we believe they will benefit from their exposure to the structural growth trend of financial institutions investing in digital initiatives and renewing core technology infrastructure, allowing banks to introduce new offerings and products much faster than using legacy platforms.”
10x clients include Nationwide, the largest building society in the world, and Westpac, Australia’s first and oldest bank, which is preparing to launch a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform powered by the 10x SuperCore. 10x is working with top-tier banks globally and has recently begun working with a major bank in an additional geography to deliver a greenfield transformation project.