API’s and Tools for the Next Generation of Digital Investing

By Dan Raju, Tradier CEO and Co-Founder. 

For Tradier, the future is everything. Our API-first approach to building our brokerage created a foundation for our users, and the rest of the retail trading industry, to establish their digital footprints. Equity and options trading went digital and forever changed the way investors of all levels of experience plan, monitor, and execute their trading strategies. And Tradier has been there every step of the way.

Our focus is empowering our users, whether they be self-directed investors or enterprise organizations building sophisticated trading applications. Tradier products and services are designed to empower innovative investing experiences for everyone. Firms and developers can focus on creating value and driving growth for their investors, rather than be bogged down by complexities in technology, infrastructure, regulation, and data. Here’s how this idea shapes our product design philosophies:

1. Totally Self-Directed and Self-Service: Online Investors demand the ability to work within a “totally digital” end-to-end online experience. Tradier APIs enable an online experience for a wide range of different platforms where investors can digitally onboard, fund, and invest.
   
   
2. Mobile-ready: It’s no secret that mobile devices are taking over the consumer computing market. By the end of 2020, mobile will be the primary investing experience - even for trading. The core conception of online experiences will be primarily associated with mobile rather than with a browser on a desktop before we know it. We’ve built all of Tradier’s APIs to scale and optimized their performance for mobile and all major browsers.
   
   
3. User Experience is everything: Online investors build loyalty around experiences that are simple, intuitive, and most importantly: convenient. That’s why we made building with Tradier APIs as easy as possible. Developers and designers can build completely embeddable and customizable trading experiences with the Tradier APIs. Let our “Brokerage in a box” handle the complexities of custody, order execution, and data transfer so you can focus on the user experience.
   
   
4. Beyond an App or Website: Investors look at apps and websites as services and want these platforms to easily integrate into their daily routines. These APIs must support distributing functionality outside of the application to destinations like IoT or smart home devices, social media, messaging apps, or voice assistants.
   
   
5. Data-Driven Personalization: Investors want to configure their experience in ways that meet their needs. Data-driven personalization is a growing trend and will only gain more momentum. People want to rely on the platforms they use every day to automatically configure based on their usage. We made sure that the Tradier engine stores the mission-critical real-time and historical user data that organizations use to power these experiences.
   
   
6. The unbundling of Legacy Brokers is in full swing: What legacy brokers and banks offered for decades is now being replaced by more agile, nimble, and experience-centric platforms. Retail investors are willing to make the shift to these newer platforms that offer specific features or serve broader needs. Consumers would rather subscribe to ‘Best of Breed Services” over one large legacy provider that offers a large list of sub-optimal experiences under one umbrella. Today, Tradier software powers an ecosystem with over one hundred different platforms, educators, and mentors, all at your fingertips when you join the Tradier community.
   
   
7. Next Generation Financial Products: We expect to see significant chunks of the investing industry emerge within large non-brokerage ecosystems. Large fintech ecosystems like P2P lending, ride-share firms, personal finance apps, small & midsize banks, POE small business insurance providers, and others, will start to offer investing capabilities to their consumer bases. Early offerings in this direction will attract a large number of consumers. These large firms with active user bases will look to brokerages to monetize their networks (in addition to making their platforms sticky). Tradier’s fully featured and robust APIs are built to power this next generation of investing products.
   
   
8. International Offerings: The US markets and many large US brands have always been strongly associated with the lives of consumers around the world, reflected in international market correlation to US markets. We expect a large influx of products from existing financial firms and new startups to offer the capability for global consumers seeking ways to invest in US markets. Tradier APIs are already configured to support international investors, including Know Your Customer (KYC) best practices.
   
   
9. Convergence: Self-directed equity trading and online robo-advisory services that offer a self-directed experience for investing in model portfolios are dovetailing to become more closely associated in the retail investor’s mind. This will result in online equity trading platforms offering model portfolios and digital advisors offering direct stock purchase capabilities. You can use Tradier APIs to build a trading platform and a digital advisor, fully integrated for a seamless experience.
   
   
10. Subscriptions: The rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses and other service and gig-economy business models have changed the ways companies with digital products think about monetization and generating revenue. As investing platforms evolve with other digital technologies, we expect financial services firms to begin offering fixed monthly subscription-based pricing models similar to Netflix. Tradier offers a rich set of simple pricing options that can enable firms to easily offer subscription-based investing products without sacrificing for quality.
    
    
11. Abstraction: Users must be completely abstracted from market complexities as much as possible. They should not be distracted by unnecessary factors during their trading experience. Tradier’s APIs are built to be compliant and provide the required abstractions from brokerage, clearing, data, regulatory, legacy infrastructure, and routing complexities so you and your users can focus on the most important thing: trading.