Ten things to consider when building an investment app

With more and more people looking to play an active role in their finances, some innovative investing apps have skyrocketed into popularity. We wanted to congratulate Tradier clients on their Success!  The successful apps owe a large part of their success to the viral notion of financial empowerment. But ultimately, when it is time to deliver a top tier investing platform, in addition to a great user experience and a slick design, you also need a great brokerage partner with robust API’s.  You need a partner that has the experience of empowering hundreds of popular investing apps in the market today.

So if you are building an investment app, here are a few things to must seriously consider:

1. Find a brokerage API that matches your needs

The right brokerage API can (literally) make or break your app. You need a feature-rich , high quality and scalable Brokerage API to support innovators in a highly regulated environment. You not only need functionality API that can support what you want to build on day one and be able to support you long term. A thoughtful and robust API can shortcut development time and avoid hiring of armies of engineers to get started.

The Tradier Brokerage API is one of the most widely used Brokerage API’s with a robust feature to support Investing and digital Advice platforms

2. Find a brokerage firm that matches your needs

You need a brokerage firm that is designed to function and support an API centric brokerage operation. It needs to understand compliance, risk, and execution while understanding API driven partnerships. API not only supports all US-listed securities, options and real-time data but has all the capabilities to support an Active Trading Platform, Mobile apps, and Digital Robo Advisor platforms. New account opening, funding, Account types, services, compliance, statements and confirms are all important aspects.

Tradier Brokerage has years of experience in delivering and building API products to help deliver compliant user experiences 

3. Community matters more than you think.

Choosing a brokerage API is a lot like selecting any other piece of technology: a community of developers building with it matters. Along with the assurance your users get from being supported by a widely used product, an active partner network means that staying informed and benefiting form collaboration with other partners

Tradier takes that one step further: with hundreds of partners leveraging our APIs, we work with platforms to identify special data and functionality needs and offers our experience and partnerships.

4. Responsiveness and quality of data are key:

Now more than ever, markets are experiencing unprecedented volatility, API performance is key.  If your app is serving customers with stale data, they are already behind the curve. New and experienced traders alike care about getting the timely and streaming market data to support broad and sophisticated trade strategies, Model portfolios, technical analysis, and act fast when it’s time to pull the trigger on a trade.

The Tradier Brokerage API’s are fast and real-time, giving users access to real-time intraday account data for orders, positions, and balances, including updates on fills and execution timing.

5. Right infrastructure

Markets by their nature and unpredictable. Investor's ability to succeed in the market depends heavily on their ability to have access to the markets during critical times. It is important that your API provider has a scalable and fully tested hosting infrastructure that is redundant and fault-tolerant

The Tradier API was one of the very first brokers to use cloud technologies to build its infrastructure. Our Dynamic infrastructure on AWS lets us scale and support of large ecosystem of partners.

6. Go to Market.

The Brokerage API must be simple, transparent and thoughtful. It should abstract legacy brokerage workflows and rapidly enable your ability to launch your product. Someone else’s legacy software stack should not hold you back from launching your app.

Tradier’s straightforward brokerage API and easy implementation mean you can get connected and started in days.

7. Find the right firm that is B2B focused and understands developers

Many brokerage firms offer API to get trading volume. You need a firm that understands that they need to power a full investing experience with Trading being an essential component. The firm need to understand everything from account onboarding to placing a trade. Your brokerage API provider must be a One-stop shop that makes life easier for your developers and your users. While many brokerage APIs will offer the trading functions that you need, growing to include more advanced and supplemental features will require integrating additional software.


Tradier was built by Developers for Developers and offers a fully loaded brokerage API, Advisor API and Data API’s built with a B2B focus. Tradier offers a wide variety of pricing models to support your platforms including commission-free equity and options trading.

8. Ability to support all US listed Securities and account types

To that end, Tradier Brokerage offers all US-listed securities, including stocks, options, mutual funds, and ETFs. This means building with the Tradier Brokerage API lets your customers unlock the full potential of US markets. Tradier has a great partnership with Apex Clearing Corp, who also serve as the clearing firm for Tradier Brokerage. Together with Apex we are always working to innovate and offer the best solutions to enable our clients.

9. Mobile support and enablement:

 
These days people are constantly checking their investment portfolios and managing their trading strategies, even when on the go. Mobile investing platforms are changing the way investing is consumed by online investors.

Building a mobile app to accompany your platform (or a desktop application if you are mobile-first) can be a daunting challenge, so we have made the Tradier API as straightforward as possible to seamlessly work across devices. Or leverage our white label web product for a fully integrated online trading experience.

10. Do not go it alone

Market complexity and compliance regulations are engaged in a constant race, each trying to stay one step ahead of the other. Making sure your business is always up to date on one alone can be challenging, managing both can be downright frustrating.

We’ve been down these roads hundreds of times with our partners and clients and know what challenges and limitations innovators have work with. Tradier strongly believes that regulations and compliance create value and protect investors and so Tradier API have been built to stay and support the required regulations.

Please contact sales@tradier.com for more information or visit www.tradier.com