The financial services industry is undergoing deep technological change. API-first architectures are creating new possibilities for integration. Digital platforms are democratizing access to investing. Artificial intelligence is personalizing wealth management. Digital-first brokerages are redefining what’s possible. Global investing barriers are falling. Traditional firms are navigating complex digital transformations. And infrastructure companies are scaling to meet growing demands.
To help us understand these critical trends, we’re joined by Harry Temkin, Chief Digital Officer at DriveWealth. DriveWealth is at the forefront of embedded investing technology, powering fractional trading and digital investment experiences for partners across the globe. As CDO, Harry leads the company’s technology strategy and digital innovation initiatives, bringing decades of experience in financial technology.
Temkin shares, “Our mission is to democratize investing through embedded finance. We’re powering digital wallets around the world. We’re making it seamless for users to invest in U.S. equities, even if they’re in countries where that wasn’t possible before.”
What makes DriveWealth stand out is its technology stack. It enables global retail investing at scale, powering apps from Brazil to the Philippines. “We’re not just a brokerage. We’re a technology firm that embeds investment capability into ecosystems.” Temkin notes.
He also discusses how real-time trading and fractional investing are changing expectations. “People want to make decisions quickly, and our systems make that possible in real time, not hours later.”
As digital platforms evolve, DriveWealth is preparing to integrate emerging technologies. Such as merging generative AI to further enhance user engagement. “We’re looking at how AI can personalize investment journeys, not just provide chat responses,” Temkin says.
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Enabling cross-border investing with embedded technology
At the heart of DriveWealth’s strategy is cross-border investing, allowing users in Latin America, Asia, and beyond to access U.S. equities. “We’re operating in over 150 countries today,” Temkin shares. “And it’s all powered through APIs that integrate with digital wallets and fintech apps.”
The conversation dives into how DriveWealth partners with digital wallets, neobanks, and super apps to bring investment functionality directly to end-users. “What we’re doing is embedding the brokerage experience directly into those platforms,” Temkin explains.
He also highlights the regulatory complexities of operating globally. “Every market has its own KYC/AML requirements. Our job is to streamline that, to abstract complexity away from our partners.”
The power of real-rime trading
Real-time trading isn’t just a feature — it’s foundational to user trust and experience, says Temkin. “When someone executes a trade, they want confirmation and clarity immediately. That’s what we deliver.”
DriveWealth’s platform enables fractional, real-time execution of trades. This makes investment accessible even for users without large capital. “We don’t just support buying a share of Apple; we let you buy $5 worth of Apple, instantly,” Temkin adds.
This has opened new opportunities for fintechs offering stock back rewards, giving users fractional shares as loyalty incentives. “It’s one of the fastest-growing embedded investment use cases,” he notes.
From APIs to personalization: What’s next in Embedded Finance
Temkin shares that DriveWealth’s roadmap includes more than just APIs and execution. “We’re thinking about next-gen engagement: how do we use generative AI to guide users based on their behavior, preferences, and goals?”
He adds that personalization will be critical in making digital investment experiences feel natural, not forced. “We’re evolving from passive tools to active partners in a user’s financial life.”
Generative AI might soon play a role in surfacing insights and next steps for users. It may even create an intelligent interface for investing. “This could be a game-changer for less experienced investors,” Temkin suggests.
The Big Ideas
- Embedded investment is an infrastructure play, not just a feature. “We’re not adding investing to apps. We’re powering platforms that center investment in everyday experiences.”
- DriveWealth is making global retail investment seamless. “From Brazil to Indonesia, users are accessing U.S. markets without needing to know what happens behind the curtain.”
- Stock back rewards are building financial engagement. “You spend money and get a piece of the companies you support. People love that. It’s simple, but powerful.”
- Real-time trading is no longer optional. “It builds trust. People need to see confirmation and execution instantly. That’s become the norm.”
- Generative AI could become a personalized investment guide. “AI won’t replace the interface, but it could enhance understanding and help users take smarter actions.”
Read the transcript (for TS Pro subscribers)
DriveWealth’s API-first origins
I think it’s kind of cool to talk a little bit about our roots. Bob Courtright founded the company back in 2012. He had built a phenomenal FX business, a global effects business, and realized that there was this huge gap – that there was demand by global retail investors to have access to US Securities trading. Ultimately, back then, the real problem was there were huge technological barriers, and there were huge financial barriers. If you remember back then, we had stocks like Priceline and Google that were trading at hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars. And to a new, nascent retail investor, it just wasn’t accessible financially for them.
And then, of course, the technology. When you think about legacy brokerage technology, you’re talking about massive order management systems, fixed connectivity, beginning of day files. And you had clients, you had partners who were building these new mobile experiences, and they didn’t have a clue what an order management system was, much less fixed connectivity. And so really we had to rethink the way that we would deliver brokerage at scale globally.
Building cloud-based brokerage as a service
Bob’s vision was to really build the first cloud-based API-delivered brokerage as a service platform. What does that mean? It allows our partners, effectively, to natively embed investing directly into their mobile experience or their web experience with literally no traditional brokerage infrastructure. All of these new emerging FinTech firms, digital wallets in particular, they want an API-based experience. That’s really their expectation. And if you walked in and said, you need fix, you need order management, you’re gonna have to do statements, confirms, handle corporate actions – that really wasn’t going to fly.
So ultimately, we set out to build a new brokerage type of infrastructure that literally would handle all the components of brokerage – onboarding, money movement, order management, portfolio management and all the post-trade services, corporate actions and the like, and to really serve that up in an API. So that solved the technical barrier to entry, then we had to really solve the financial barrier to entry, and the way that we did that was we truly were the pioneers of fractional investing. We enabled securities to be fractionalized, ultimately, to just send us a notional order. Back then, we started with a minimum amount of $1. Today, we actually go to a penny, which creates all kinds of other really cool products, like roundups and other things that many of our clients take advantage of. But when you combine those two things – the fractional trading capability and the technological advancement of delivering everything to an API – all of a sudden it unlocked all of these new markets and these new types of partners to be able to bring investing to their client base.
Early vision for global expansion
Bob had built this global retail base of currency investors, or currency traders. I think ultimately, he began to see, particularly from foreign investors, this demand. They wanted access to these huge brands. Certainly, these technology stocks were incredibly popular, they were very expensive, but there were all those barriers. When we started the company, some of our earliest partners, like our earliest partner in the United States was MoneyLion. Today, you can see the size and how big MoneyLion has grown their business, and they’ve expanded their product and capabilities with us over those years.
But certainly, we were very focused outside the United States. We saw new entrants in the Australian market. We have Stake, which is a digital broker dealer, going way back to the early days. Then ultimately, we were focused heavily on Asia. You had all of these traders who wanted access to the US market. And it was very challenging to give them that access without this sort of change in technology to make it available through a mobile application. From our very early days, we were very much focused outside the United States. That’s why I say the demand by a global retail investor and reaching all of these new entrants – the US market was pretty saturated.
Innovation with digital wallets
It didn’t mean that there weren’t also new players coming into the market. Certainly, one of our biggest clients, and one where we had built some incredibly cool, innovative technology, is Cash App. Many of your listeners may not realize that we power all of the equity investing in Cash App, as we do in Revolut Securities. These are some of the largest digital wallets in the world.
What was super cool about what Cash App wanted to do, and other wallets, and we made some really significant innovation in money movement – they wanted to tie the brokerage account so much more closely to the wallet. In a sense, they wanted the brokerage account just to be a sleeve of the wallet. When you think about traditional brokerage, what do you need to do? I have my bank account, and then I have my brokerage account. Typically, they were at two different parties. So you have to go through the onboarding process of brokerage – back then that actually potentially took a day, upload a driver’s license, some paper form, potentially. Our innovation was to make it totally digital, onboard just about instantaneously, and then to be able to actually trade instantaneously as well. Those kinds of things had never been done before – to go directly from nothing to actually owning a stock within seconds.
Eliminating friction points
The idea was, we want to actually have the digital wallet be the one account of record where all the money stays. I don’t want to have to have the user think about wiring money or transferring money over to my brokerage account, and then I have a separate buying power in the brokerage account. Now I have a wallet over here on the left, and I have another application for brokerage on the right, and I have to think about moving money. All of those things were barriers. They were friction points, particularly for a new investor.
So imagine a world in which you’ve got a wallet user, and they’re using that wallet to do peer-to-peer payments, send money to a friend, pay for dinner with a friend. They’re using that wallet to go into a coffee shop and tap the phone or use the debit card. Imagine a world in which that experience would be exactly the same as buying Starbucks stock. So I went into Starbucks, I tapped the phone, it took $6 out of my wallet, and then immediately I said, “Oh, go buy $6 of Starbucks stock,” the money just came out of the wallet. There was no wait, I have to transfer money first. How much buying power do I have? It was incredibly transformational. All of a sudden, all of these friction points we were able to eliminate with our technology and to create an experience that had never been done before. For us at DriveWealth, that’s always what it’s been about when we think about digital innovation and brokerage – how do we take traditional, analog brokerage and do something different, deliver it through an API, build something that hasn’t been done to enable this really cool, unique experience that our partners want to bring to the marketplace.
AI’s impact on financial services
I think it’s a really interesting question. For us, remember, we’re really like the Intel model – we’re the Intel platform inside. We create or enable the investing experience with our partners, and so now a lot of our partners certainly are engaging AI, whether that’s to, particularly in a managed account structure, build more efficient portfolios, more accurate portfolios for a client based on their profile or how they onboard, and have that be more dynamic in terms of potentially rebalancing and those things.
For us on the backside, certainly AI will help tremendously around risk management with respect to anti-money laundering, our monitoring of transactions through our platform, our customer service portal in terms of how our partners engage with us. We can create much more efficient experiences with AI for our partners in terms of the way they work with us. So there’s both the back end and there’s the front end. A lot of our partners are beginning to think about how they utilize AI to bring a better investing experience to their customers. And then, on our side, we are thinking about how we use AI to be more efficient in our processes.
Today, we support over 20 million users, so there are a lot of really cool tools that we use today to monitor transactions, monitor money movement, continuously monitor users on the platform for sanctions or other things. And I think these emerging technologies significantly help in the process of monitoring and managing all of those things.
Redefining digital brokerage
Let’s break it up into a couple of different archetypes. One is, obviously, global digital wallets – it’s one of our sweet spots. We power Cash App, we power Revolut, we power Toss Securities in South Korea. We pretty much are powering some of the largest digital wallets around the world.
We also obviously cater to traditional broker dealers and asset managers who are making the move to digital, meaning they’re investing in their infrastructure. They want to build a new digital experience for not just a nascent retail investor, but even their high net worth investors. Give them a whole new experience, give them better access to their advisor and what they can do within the application.
We’ve always kind of been in the space of servicing digital robo advisors and some of the tools that we provide them. And then, interestingly enough, what we’re seeing now is you’ve got some of the big retail platforms coming into the space. When you look globally at some of the biggest retail platforms and their mobile experiences, they’re going well beyond just a shopping experience. They’re offering buy now, pay later. They’re offering insurance products. They’re offering banking products. We had that concept just a couple years back of the Super App, and a lot of these companies are doing just that. They have a huge user base that they want to continue to engage and to retain, and in order to do that, they need to continue to provide more services to that customer, and to tie these capabilities all together into the other experiences that they already provide.
The power of roundups and behavioral finance
With digital wallets, to me, it’s one of the coolest experiences that we’ve been able to create – this ability to take a brokerage account and literally put it inside of a wallet as just a sleeve. I don’t need to think about movement of money anymore. It’s just another element of the wallet and that experience. So buying a cup of coffee or buying six bucks of Starbucks becomes exactly the same thing.
But even more importantly, you can tie other really cool, innovative features. One of the biggest things that we’ve seen to draw users in and to engage a user is the Roundup. Every time you swipe the card, the remainder up to the nearest dollar gets immediately invested in a stock of choice. Imagine as that continues to be enhanced. Imagine a world in which we can actually recognize what you bought with your card. So, oh, I went into McDonald’s and I bought a hamburger. We can round that up into McDonald’s stock. Oh, I walked into a Starbucks and I bought a cup of coffee, I rounded up the remainder into Starbucks stock. So imagine being able to code against the transaction code, understanding where you purchase something. And if it’s a public company, be able to do that. There are companies today who actually have that software that does that.
I always have felt that at some point, credit card companies, instead of cash back, would do stock back rewards. I think there’s going to be an evolution here of how you can continually tie investing against spending and the like. When we kind of pitch clients about the beauty of roundups, I talk about the balance between spending and investing. The most important thing for a young investor is beginning the investing journey, the savings journey.
The Roundup, to me is super cool, because if I go into a store and I buy whatever, it doesn’t matter, I spend $10.40, the other 60 cents, which rounds me up to $11 – did I notice that? No, what’s the difference between $10.40 and $11? But all of a sudden, I put 60 cents away. Now a lot of listeners here might say, “Well, geez, 60 cents. What’s that going to do?” In my account alone, I’ve done on my Cash App account, I’ve already done well over 1,000 roundups. I’ve been putting the money into Nvidia and even though we’ve had some really big swings in the market, I’ve amassed $500 in Nvidia return and roundups that I never felt – I didn’t even realize, it had no impact on my digital wallet. I didn’t see all of a sudden the money disappear. But I’ve already amassed $500 in investing. That’s the power of a roundup, particularly for a young investor – it gets their journey started with no real financial impact to them.
What we’ve seen is a huge percent of users that use roundups on any of the platforms end up actually going on to becoming a self-directed investor. They then go do their own trading in the account. So it’s an incredible engagement tool or retention tool. And I think you’re going to continue to see those types of tools evolve, whether that’s stock back reward or the like. And it’s all made possible because of the technology of having ease of integration and a fractionalization engine that allows you to trade any stock for as little as a penny.
Passive and active integration
It sounds almost like you’re saying once you’ve gotten over that technological hurdle of not having a separate bucket for your brokerage account, and it’s integrated into a wallet experience, and you’re tying together brokerage experiences into your core experiences, then brokerage is something you don’t go to and it’s something that kind of happens in the background. There’s a passive role of brokerage.
It’s both – it’s passive and active. So every time that I’m doing something in the app, if I buy something, there’s this passive investing that’s happening continuously, but then it’s right there. The experience of not having to think about how much buying power is over there – think about a young investor, and you ask them to segment their money. They’re scared to death to do this, because they feel like they need all their money in their checking account right now, but in that wallet, the fact that they don’t have to segment anything. And every time they do something, they’re getting a little bit of investing, and then they realize, oh, I can spend $5 on something, $10 on something, and six months later, they’ve amassed so much more money.
Global integration examples
With respect to brokers that are making the move to digital, one of the cool things that the technology allows those partners is they’re able to build a next generation experience for their customer, which incorporates both self-directed trading as well as discretionary or managed accounts, but more importantly, it allows them to tie together banking in a way that wasn’t possible before.
One of the cool things about our – we have a very large partner in Brazil, BTG Pactual. And one of the cool things that they were able to do with our technology was build this sort of seamless integration between having a Brazilian bank account, a US bank account, and the US brokerage account, and the ability to very easily move money from Brazil to the brokerage account, or from the US account to the brokerage account, or vice versa. And doing that, by the way, in an instantaneous way.
In that sense, the brokerage account is sort of traditional. There’s buying power. You’re moving money. And there’s reasons why we have both actually, and when there’s foreign exchange involved in other things, you potentially want to put money into a US brokerage account, have US dollars. These are more sophisticated users who understand buying power and what they’re doing. But the experience of literally being able to move money in that mobile experience instantly from either Brazilian Reais into dollars, or from a US domiciled account, and to have that triangle connected, and to be able to offer more than just equities, but offshore mutual funds and fixed income – access to US Treasuries and access to US high corporate bonds, that’s what they’re able to do now.
If you think about a traditional brokerage, client has to figure out – well, not figure out, but they know what to do. But still, they have to wire money. They have to convert money. They have to go to the bank. Sometimes it’s even a manual process, it’s an in-person process, and then pick up a phone and place an order. That’s still a world in which it’s very analog. And so these companies are making investments in their technology to move to this really incredible digital experience. And again, that’s because of what we’ve built with our technology stack.
Scaling challenges and cloud-first advantage
I’ll tell you, I think the beauty of DriveWealth is we started from scratch. We really didn’t have legacy infrastructure. We literally started the platform in AWS, in the cloud. And I have to tell you, back then, it took us about two years to get our full carrying licenses. So the company started in ’12, and we really got the licenses in ’14 and began the build out of the tech stack. And really had gone to market and started having our first clients in ’14 and ’15.
I remember those days. And actually remember sitting on a panel, I think, at Thomson Reuters, with traditional brokers. And here I was at DriveWealth, and I literally remember saying, “We literally could run the entire broker dealer from a MacBook.” Think about how cool that was. It was all dials and gauges in Amazon, and we literally could, in an instant, scale boxes up, add new boxes. We didn’t have this issue of, we have bare metal in a cage somewhere that we had to manage and deal with scalability. And so we really had this advantage that as we scaled and Amazon really grew as well.
At the time, I think they were built to support Netflix, it wasn’t really built to support brokerage. And so there were some things that we did and took advantage of some of their new technologies over time to support our scale. But really the beauty of living in the cloud from day one was exactly that – on demand. We could add more boxes. We could add capacity to handle the number of users, and we could burst boxes if we saw heavy transaction rates. Remember, back then, we were still on T+3, we hadn’t even gone to T+2 yet, much less T+1. So we had some – I’m not going to say we didn’t have our issues over the course of time, because again, they were growing pains with Amazon. They weren’t really in the business of supporting brokerage at the beginning, but it worked for us. It allowed us to take advantage of some really cool tech and to be able to scale the business as we needed.
Current scale and performance
Today, just to give you some stats, we support about 90 partners pretty much all over the world. The combined number of users across those platforms is well over 20 million users. And we support, quite frankly, not just new sort of digital FinTech, but we also support brokers with traditional FIX. And the way we’ve enhanced that is we’ve built out infrastructure at NY4, so we’re co-located with everybody else, very high speed, capacity and efficiency. And we’re able to accept notional orders on those FIX lines, and we can go 24 by 5.
We take certain aspects of our tech platform and make them available, sort of in still old school ways for those clients that want to come to us via FIX for more speed and access to the market. I would say again, also that with Amazon, we’ve evolved our APIs as well. Traditionally, when you think about REST APIs, they’re RESTful – you make a request, something happens, and then you hit another endpoint to get a status of something. Well, we took advantage a bunch of years back of Amazon’s SQS event service, and so for every API request that you make, once you do that, you basically get continuous streaming updates on what is occurring to the user’s account or anything else. So effectively, the client just needs to build a data store. They don’t need any other traditional infrastructure, as we said. And the fact that the events come in streaming now was a huge enhancement when we made that available, actually, it’s been quite some time. It was probably six years ago, seven years ago when we did that, but Amazon evolved. Their platform became more apt to handling high speed transactions, not just streaming video, but the things that we do in brokerage, and it’s worked out very well for us.
I think if we had to start with legacy infrastructure, that would have been a real issue for us. I’m not saying – books and record system that’s still third party, if you want to call that legacy, fine, but part of the innovation was learning how to take and adapt a real time API-based system and engage it with a traditional books and record system. And we’ve done that. And over the years, you upgrade it, enhanced it. But I think that worked out really well for us.
Growth trajectory
I will share with you – look, as a small company, and I mentioned the 20 million users. We started the company as an A round, $6 million A round with, I think, 38 employees, maybe mostly on the brokerage side. My tech team at the time was, I think, a dozen strong. And in August of ’21 we did a D round at $450 million. And today, we were around 300 plus employees. So the company has really, really grown.
And I’d say even looking at Q1 of ’25 versus Q1 of ’24, our assets have grown 4x, our notional trade volumes grown 3x, our daily average revenue trades DARTs up 60%. We just had an incredible run over these last couple years, really significant growth. That round really helped us to be able to invest in the business further, to go beyond just being an equities business to really beginning to offer all of the other asset classes on the platform.
You can always share stories going back to the super, super early days where you were using maybe a lower cost data feed, because, very early, and the data feed gave you bad data, and all of a sudden, oh, my God, you had a day in which you came through it, but your blood was pumping. Let’s put it that way. And that’s real startup, and that’s exciting at the same time as it is scary. But now we’re this really well established business with incredible partners around the world and a technology platform that we’ve continued to scale and build out to handle the number of transactions that we see.
Today, on any given day, we’re doing several million transactions a day. That puts us up in the top five tier of broker dealers in the United States, and many of those trades are fractional in nature. That’s how important fractional trading has been. So I think it’s been wonderful that, again, we weren’t burdened by starting with legacy tech, we really started out of the box, brand new.
Future innovation and roadmap
For us, our roadmap right now is pretty full with extending our offering – additional asset classes that our customers want and need, and as we expand those asset classes, it’s also about, how do you do that in an innovative way? How do you make, how do you normalize the ability to buy a bond in exactly the same way that you buy an equity, or an option, or an offshore mutual fund, or a US mutual fund? It’s once again, bringing those assets onto the platform in innovative ways and making them available through our existing API stack. So for our clients, the integration is very, very easy to add these other capabilities.
International expansion
I think also we’ll be having a look at international markets. Your users may not be aware, but not too long ago, we obtained our licenses in Lithuania, and we obtained our licenses in Singapore. Lithuania gives you passport, as they call it, to the EU and so ultimately, our first thought process was that makes it easier for us to offer US securities in those markets, being licensed there. Every country has a different regulatory regime in terms of how you can offer products. What products can be offered? Is it fully disclosed? Is it omnibus? And so forth. So having a license in Singapore and a license in Lithuania makes it a bit easier for us to disseminate product in those areas of the world.
I do think we are seeing demand from our customers to have access to more than just US, particularly our partners that are in Europe, or our partners that are in Asia. They’d love to work with a single provider that can not just give them access to US, but other markets as well. And so that’s something that we’ll be exploring over the coming quarters, as to whether we think it’s an important thing to expand right now.
We’re very focused, though, on continuing to offer the remainder of the core US offerings, because that, particularly in South America, there’s huge demand for fixed income products and mutual funds, and so that’s where a lot of our energy is right now.
