The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Dan Raju

< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

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Dan Raju
Chief Executive Officer
Tradier
PNR

Readers of financial news websites or blogs have long been accustomed to taking an extra step, perhaps logging on elsewhere, to trade on any information they pick up. With the application programming interface launched in 2014 by Tradier, the transaction can be just a click away. The API allows what Charlotte, North Carolina–based Tradier terms brokerage-as-a-service: trading, market data and account servicing, which more than 100 technology providers have integrated with their offerings. “The idea was to take all of the heavy lifting that the old incumbent brokerage firms have done and expose that as an open cloud platform for anybody to use and have that same power the big guys have,” says CEO Dan Raju, 41. Before co-founding Tradier in 2013, Raju spent three years as head of global technology infrastructure and operations at Associated Press and two years as chief information officer of online brokerage TradeKing. By 2009 he and several colleagues were taking note of how delivery of financial services was becoming more automated and mobile, and of how difficult it was for legacy brokerage firms to keep pace. Traditionally, a firm creating a new investment product had to be a broker-dealer and spend significant amounts of time and money on an infrastructure and clearing and exchange relationships. With Tradier’s open-source, cloud-based API, “you can log in today and start building a product and launch two weeks from now,” says Raju. As a licensed broker-dealer in all 50 states, Tradier takes on all of the regulatory overhead and provides security guidelines for users. Customers range from fintech start-ups to one of the largest peer-to-peer lenders in China.

2016 Trading Technology 40