Helping Banks Leverage Data and AI to be More Customer-Centric: Our Participation in Hyperlayer’s Funding Round

Driven by ever-increasing competitive pressures, banks and financial services businesses are looking to implement new products with customer-centric features  - such as speciality accounts, payments and loyalty programs - taking advantage of data-driven and AI-enabled personalisation techniques.

Most financial firms have amassed substantial amounts of data about their customers, including their interests, preferences, and transaction histories. But leveraging all of that data has been challenging, since the required data often resides in many different legacy systems that are difficult, costly or even impossible to modify.

That’s where Hyperlayer and its programmable financial services platform comes in. The platform is a composable layer that sits atop existing systems for cash, credit, rewards, stocks, bonds, or funds and leverages a low-latency rules engine for rapid financial product development - weeks instead of months and without the cost, risk, or disruption of modifying existing live systems.By deploying Hyperlayer, a financial services firm can rapidly create a vast, configurable product set that can be used across different customer channels. It supports agentic, conversational banking and provides future-proofed propositions that deliver personalisation at the user level.

In short, Hyperlayer modernises existing infrastructure (whether it be on-premise or cloud-hosted) and drives both revenue and customer engagement for firms that deploy it. This is why we are delighted to announce Iona Star’s participation in Hyperlayer’s recent funding round alongside CDAM, Mouro Capital, and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments.

With Hyperlayer, AI agents can translate natural language chatbot requests  into financial actions, such as: "If my balance drops below $1,000, top up from savings," or "Move 10% of my salary into my investment account when markets rise." Because Hyperlayer enables programmability across existing accounts and ledgers, AI agents can authorise and execute actions in real time, not just respond to queries.

“We have known and been monitoring the Hyperlayer team for some time and they have achieved a lot in a short space of time with their innovative offering. The platform provides continuous, real-time, hyper-personalised, and predictive AI-powered services at scale, which is a growing requirement for differentiation amongst banks, asset managers, and others with access to first-party data,” said Mike Powell, Partner at Iona Star.

Operating in a data-intensive and AI-aligned arena, Hyperlayer fits Iona Star’s investment thesis well. It’s also an attractive investment as it has already signed tier-1 banks as customers.