Meet Sandbox Wealth — A Demo Day 11 Presenting Startup

This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Ray Denis, Founder & CEO of New York-based Sandbox Wealth, a financial technology startup with a turnkey platform that allows independent advisors and family offices to offer sophisticated cash management and credit products to their clients.

Ray, tell us a bit about your Sandbox Wealth. What problems are you solving?

Sandbox Wealth is an open finance platform for wealth managers. Through our network of banking partners, we provide independent advisory firms, including RIAs, Family Offices, Trust Companies, and Insurance Carriers, with sophisticated cash management and credit solutions for their clients.

We solve for a broad array of issues. For example, rather than selling assets to make tax payments or moving assets to lenders to support reduced mortgage rates, we build the rails that connect client data from custodians and end clients themselves to streamline the process of accessing these solutions while helping advisors build deeper relationships.

Many people will think that high-net-worth individuals don’t need help managing liquidity since, by definition, they have a lot of money. How are they using the liquidity they can access through your platform?

First, we should highlight the difference between assets and liquidity. I’ve worked with thousands of clients over my career, and every balance sheet is different because every client has made their wealth differently. Many clients are entrepreneurs who have substantial wealth in a closely held business or have invested heavily in private equity. Generally speaking, these assets aren’t liquid and can’t be used to make opportunistic investments or to purchase real estate.

This is where access to liquidity becomes critical. Using our platform to compile balance sheet and cash flow data, we can dramatically reduce the timeline for accessing credit because lenders rely on having clean and deep information on borrowers and collateral. Further, clients can remain invested and maintain a strategic view of how they manage their portfolios.

Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?

Being part of the Fintech Sandbox community has far exceeded my expectations. As part of the Data Access Residency, we’ve been able to work with teams like Morningstar, Plaid, SQX, and others to source critical data for our platform, but the community has contributed far more than just data. We’ve been able to connect with other founders to trade notes on prospective investors, accelerator programs, and recruiting. I definitely underestimated the value of being part of a network of founders building solutions in adjacent verticals.

Why is data access important to your startup?

Our mission is to enable the free flow of data and capital. By building a standardized workflow for sharing complex data sets between financial institutions and clients, we eliminate data asymmetries between parties while reducing friction in providing (and accessing) liquidity.

What is your company’s origin story?

I’ve been working with wealthy clients for nearly two decades to deliver custom liquidity solutions while serving at major financial institutions. Throughout my career, I’ve originated many billions of dollars of debt, and virtually every transaction required some degree of manual effort to parse out balance sheet and cash flow details from an unstructured data set, which can be as painful for clients as it is for lenders.

Using the latest tools available, including multimodal LLMs, open banking, and real-time payments, we suddenly had a product opportunity to eliminate several manual, time-consuming, and expensive processes. Ultimately, the solution was to effectively build a capital-efficient and open-architecture private banking platform that serves clients, advisors, and lenders. When paired with the market opportunity as more investment advisors started leaving private banks and wirehouses to join or form independent firms, I found myself with a compelling concept for a venture-scale business.

What milestones has Sandbox Wealth achieved thus far?

We’ve raised our pre-seed round led by NextGen Venture Partners, which included participation from Northwestern Mutual. We also have a really beautiful MVP that will serve as a rock-solid foundation for many of the exciting products we’re rolling out this year. These accomplishments have led to substantial business development opportunities, including lending relationships with Tier 1 lenders as well as design partnerships with enterprise firms like MassMutual and Halo Investing.

How does Sandbox Wealth view open banking?

People often view open banking as a way to aggregate data from financial institutions, which is true, but there’s far more to it than that. We look at open banking as a way to decouple banking software from banks, which enables more seamless access to data across financial institutions. This creates an ability to extract and share complex financial data securely, which, when paired with real-time payments, effectively means you can develop one fully operational banking platform that can plug into multiple banks and brokers.

Once you have unlocked this data, you no longer have to rely on manual processes to calculate cash flows, liquidity, net worth, or leverage, which will drive more efficient underwriting processes, spending decisions, and planning advice across lenders, clients, and advisors, respectively.

What trends in fintech are you most excited about?

It’s hard not to be excited about fintech’s trajectory when you look at the progress in open banking, real-time payments, and AI. Having access to one innovative and foundational technology to build a firm like ours would be abnormal at any point in history, but we now have access to three that are all on par with things like the magnetic strip and the ATM.

How does Sandbox Wealth think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?

Agentic workflows that can sweep funds to cover shortfalls or optimize yield across your bank accounts can be initiated via text or voice inputs instead of complex manual processes.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

To hear more about Sandbox Wealth and 4 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 11!