In a fintech market expanding at pace across Singapore, driven by the emergence of a new breed of start-ups, the early beginnings of Canopy buck the trend.

Founded in a local shophouse in 2015 - rather than a collaborative studio or incubator - the fledging business was built on the foundations of data, forming part of the Mesitis Group.

Backed by client and investor Credit Suisse, Canopy offers account aggregation, portfolio analytics and client reporting solutions to financial institutions, wealth management professionals and high net-worth individuals.

With profitability now in sight, the importance of leveraging technology to improve customer experience stands tall as a leading priority for the start-up.

Leading the charge as Chief Technology Officer is Amit Prakash Gupta, who developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based solution to process PDF bank statements in recognition that “every bank speaks a different language”.

Through AI and machine learning, Gupta and his team converted common language threads allowing investors process information at speed.

Specifically, the solution processes the statements to “extract, identify, tag, transform, enrich, escalate and insert” the data into a database, allowing customers to view the information “in a matter of minutes”, spanning more than 100 banks.

With the exception of the USA, world markets do not allow access to private wealth data digitally, meaning timely analytics represents a “broken function”.

In response, Gupta and his team have helped Canopy move towards becoming the “data pipeline” of the private wealth world, through a 2.0 version of the business.

The innovation has allowed the business to expand globally through the digitisation of over 160 bank statements which in turn has reduced customer serving costs and created a “technology-first” mindset internally.