By Vasyl Soloshchuk/ Insart
| Site: | https://tradier.com/ |
| Established: | 2012 |
| Value proposition: | Provider of a financial services cloud focusing on B2B integrations and open APIs for US-based stock and option trading. |
| The executive team: | Dan Raju, Cofounder, Chairman of the Board, CEO Jason Barry, Cofounder, CTO Peter Laptewicz, Cofounder, President of Tradier Brokerage Jeyashree Chidambaram, Cofounder, VP of Brokerage Technology Paul H. Lee, SVP of Operations of Tradier Brokerage |
Tradier is an API-based cloud brokerage platform that enables trading of securities to both self-directed investors and partnering advisors. At the core of their solution is a REST API, which allows other FinTech companies to seamlessly and quickly integrate their solutions and place orders using HTTP queries. The simplicity and usability of the API make it easy to provide variously focused brokerage services; this is why Tradier partners with other platforms on top of developing their own. Moreover, Tradier can withstand high loads while executing a vast number of orders simultaneously, thus remaining competitive.
To get more details first hand, I met with Jason Barry, CTO and Cofounder. He takes on the technical side of the work due to his development background. We discussed many technical aspects and I obtained an oversight of the role of API-based solutions for the industry today.
Like the other cofounders, Jason previously worked at TradeKing, which has been acquired by Ally. TradeKing delivered APIs while making lots of internal services available.
“We all recognized that we felt like there was a really good opportunity to take these APIs and build something really great that made a lot of these financial services available to anybody.”
The history of Tradier starts in 2012. Within about a year, Jason and the other cofounders raised about two million dollars to start the broker-dealer, register in 50 states, and build the tech. They assessed the real market need and grew their technology stack from zero to over 300 million API calls per month, with hundreds of thousands of requests per hour at peak times.
Renovating the API-based platform concept
Jason recognizes that the idea of providing an API for brokerage services isn’t new. There are several companies that have been providing APIs for much longer, such as Interactive Brokers. Nevertheless, their offerings don’t interfere with Tradier as there are many differentiators that ensure the company has its own customers.
“[Compared to Interactive Brokers,] our pricing models are very different and target very different investors. We offer really transparent fees and our API technology is vastly different, much more modern, as with REST-based APIs one can pretty much [integrate] from anywhere, [using] any kind of language.”
Unlike with Interactive Brokers, customers don’t need to set up servers, have them running all the time, and still have software in place, as everything is done in the cloud. In this way, Tradier ensures the house processes are well documented, as changes made without notice can greatly affect the partners’ businesses.
“We heard horror stories from other customers who have integrated with brokers where they wake up one morning and all their stuff is broken because a change happened back in the API stack and no one knew.”