< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

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

1. Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg 2. Richard Prager BlackRock Building Resilient Portfolios: Infrastructure’s Strategic Advantage Sponsored by IFM Investors May 9, 2025 3. Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets 4. Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings 5. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq

6. Brad Levy Markit 7. Dan Keegan Citi 8. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 9. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group 10. Ari Studnitzer CME Group

11. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 12. Gerald O’Connell CBOE Holdings 13. Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 14. Gil Mandelzis EBS BrokerTec (ICAP) 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Rob Park IEX Group 17. Philip Weisberg Thomson Reuters 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 19. Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange 20. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities

21. Eric Noll Convergex 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 23. Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings 24. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology 25. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange

26. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 27. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 28. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock AQR Capital Mgmt 30. Stu Taylor Algomi

31. D. Keith Ross Jr. PDQ Enterprises 32. Donal Byrne Corvil 33. Alfred Eskandar Portware 34. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 35. Masayuki Hosaka Rakuten

36. Peter Maragos and David Karat Dash Financial 37. Amar Kuchinad Electronifie 38. Jennifer Nayar SR Labs 39. Dave Snowdon Metamako 40. Dan Raju Tradier