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.
 1. Richard Prager BlackRock  2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets  3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq  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 |