< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives

37. Dan Raju
Executive Chair and Chief Information Officer
Tradier
Last year: 40

Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become popular vehicles for reducing the time and resources required to bring innovative financial products to market. Tradier, co-founded in 2013 by Dan Raju, calls itself "the first brokerage API company." More than 100 companies and thousands of developers are using the "brokerage as a platform," with support from Charlotte, North Carolina–based Tradier Brokerage, to assemble and deliver data and trading tools for financial clients. Tradier slashes years off traditional development time frames, enabling trading platforms and digital advisers to be launched in weeks or months, says Raju, 42. According to a testimonial from Dan Schleifer, CEO of ChartIQ, "Integrating Tradier's API into our mobile charting platform was a breeze." Raju adds that execution and custody costs in the Tradier API cloud are one third the market rate.

A former head of global technology infrastructure and operations at the Associated Press and chief information officer of online brokerage TradeKing (now part of Ally Financial), Raju is currently executive chair and CIO of Tradier. In June 2016 he handed the CEO title to Stephen Ehrlich, who was founder and CEO of Lightspeed Financial and previously CEO of the E-Trade Professional Trading Group, to lead Tradier through a global expansion stage.

 
The 2017 Trading Tech 40

1. Richard Prager BlackRock 2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets 3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq Infrastructure Debt Positioned Well for the Year Ahead Sponsored by IFM Investors June 16, 2025 4. Brad Levy MarkitSERV 5. Dan Keegan Citi

6. Glenn Lesko Bloomberg Tradebook 7. Bryan Durkin CME Group 8. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 9. Mike Blum KCG Holdings 10. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group

11. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 12. Nick Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 13. Jenny Knott NEX Optimisation 14. Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets 15. Rob Park IEX Group

16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 18. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities 19. Eric Noll Convergex 20. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology

21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 22. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange 23. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 24. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney Thomson Reuters

26. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock AQR Capital Management 28. Donal Byrne Corvil 29. Stu Taylor Algomi 30. Alfred Eskandar Portware

31. Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority 32. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 33. Peter Maragos Dash Financial 34. John Fawcett Quantopian 35. Donald Ross III PDQ Enterprises

36. Jennifer Nayar Vela Trading Technologies 37. Dan Raju Tradier 38. Susan Estes OpenDoor Trading 39. David Mercer LMAX Exchange 40. Oki Matsumoto Monex Group