Cove Financial Software relocates to Milwaukee

Cove Financial Software founder Adyan Tanver believes the Midwest is the right market for fintech growth. When his emerging company was accepted into gener8tor’s Milwaukee cohort, the Toronto native decided to make the city his company headquarters.

Tanver spoke with MKEStartup.News about Cove’s platform, its move to the Midwest, and why he believes companies outside major coastal hubs are the future of fintech.

MSUN: For readers who are new to Cove, what does your platform do?

Tanver: The easiest way to understand what we do is to think of us as “Shopify for financial products.” There’s a large market of companies that have customers who could use financial services, such as credit-building products or insurance, but historically those companies haven’t had the capacity to build and offer those products themselves.

Instead, they refer their customers to companies like Chime or other fintechs and earn a small referral fee.

Cove lets those same companies build and offer the products directly, under their own brands, and capture much more of the revenue, often 75% more than they would through referrals.

MSUN: Cove allows a company to offer financial services without partnering with a bank?

Tanver: Right. The assumption used to be that launching a financial product required a bank relationship. But today there are many lightweight digital financial products that don’t require that level of infrastructure.

For example, credit-building tools. We have partners who help renters get credit for their on-time rent payments, or people who pay child support get credit for those on-time payments. Those payments aren’t usually reported to credit bureaus, but they should be. We help structure that data and report it.

We also support insurance products, like tenant insurance or lease-break policies. We work with 150 to 200 insurance providers on the back end, and Cove holds the broker licenses. A property manager isn’t inventing an insurance product. They’re white-labeling one through Cove and earning meaningful revenue while offering something beneficial to their customers.

MSUN: Who is your primary market?

Tanver: Real estate, mortgage, insurance, and lender networks are strong markets for us because they have large existing customer bases. Many of them are already referring customers to third-party providers. Cove allows them to stop giving that revenue away.

MSUN: You raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Scale Shift Ventures and received $100,000 from gener8tor. What does the next stage of growth look like?

Tanver: We’re putting together a $2 million pre-seed round right now with participation from Wisconsin-based angel investors and we are in conversation with local funds. We’ve also had interest from Silicon Valley, but part of our pitch is that the Midwest and South are underserved markets for fintech and we are intentionally based where the demand is.

MSUN: You had accelerator offers from multiple cities. Why choose Milwaukee?

Tanver: We had offers in San Francisco and New York, but those ecosystems are saturated. Customers there get pitched every day. The Midwest has scale, relationships, and customers, but not the same saturation of startup outreach.

When you bring a solution that can actually add revenue to a company here, they’re more likely to listen, evaluate it, and adopt it. Being headquartered where our target customers are just makes sense.

MSUN: What should Milwaukee’s startup community know about Cove?

Tanver: If you are a real estate company, mortgage lender, or insurance organization…reach out. We’d love to work with local partners.

To learn more about Cove Financial Software, connect with the company here.