A Charlotte-based online trading brokerage firm is looking to disrupt the retail stock market, with its local hub to lead those efforts.
Tradier, founded in 2013, offers developers, trading-platform providers and individual investors a trading platform and set of real-time application programming interfaces (APIs). Since moving into a larger headquarters space in Ballantyne following its $24.6 million capital raise last year, the company has been expanding into new product lines and broadening its outreach here.
"We have made the strategic decision to make Charlotte our main operational hub — make it a center point for every transaction that Tradier does," Dan Raju, Tradier's co-founder, chairman and CEO, told CBJ. "We are probably the new way of how people will need to do retail investing."
Tradier moved into its 8,500-square-foot office space at 3420 Toringdon Way in December. Its previous headquarters spanned 2,400 square feet and was located at 11016 Rushmore Drive, also in the Ballantyne area.
The space and funding has brought exponential growth opportunities for the firm. Tradier has tapped into the educational space, partnering with local universities and community colleges to equip students with knowledge about financial markets. It also has hired 18 employees in Charlotte over the last year, Raju said.
Additionally, the company has seen $1 billion worth of transactions about every two weeks, he said. And it has more than 100 investor platforms that offer trading, market data and brokerage services.
"We're doing that at an extremely managed low cost, like you could not do it anywhere else," Raju said.
Tradier is unlike a traditional brokerage or bank, which typically wants customers to buy their products, he said. The firm has taken a different approach, allowing its clients to choose and gain access to the platforms that best fits their needs.
"So we're trying to bring all those elements to a very archaic, legacy financial-services world," Raju said.
Tradier has been embracing the unbundled brokerage model. That means it retains its core businesses while selling, spinning off or carving out assets, product lines, divisions and subsidiaries. The approach also means offering products and services individually that had formerly been packaged together.
"I think that unbundled model has a huge pipeline and tremendous amount of acceptance in the market," Raju said. "So, we're trying to actually grow that impact broadly at a strategy-levels perspective."
The company is in the process of rolling out Tradier Futures, a platform designed for futures trading. That new trading option comes with a low-cost subscription pricing model.
After the launch of Tradier Futures, Raju said it will provide forex, or foreign exchange, trading services for clients.
With the new product lines and offerings, Tradier hopes to grow its derivative market share in the U.S. and expand internationally in that space.
"The main goal of Tradier is to enhance the impact of what we believe is our new way of supporting active investing in the market," Raju said.
