While individual retail investors represent a growing share of investment activity and companies such as Robinhood, Schwab, and Fidelity have enabled retail trading with their in-house brokerage capabilities, smaller institutions have been unable to build these capabilities.

According to Citi ventures, the democratization of the market has failed to reach lower-wealth individuals who are unable to purchase even single shares of the highest-priced stocks.

High minimums and whole share purchases have prevented access to U.S. equities and the ability to start investing with small dollar amounts was the most frequently cited motivator to start investing according to a recent DriveWealth survey.

DriveWealth’s platform and brokerage solution is changing this paradigm by expanding access to affordable investing. DriveWealth is a pioneer in “fractional-share investing,” a practice that enables investors to buy a portion of a share of a company’s stock.

As a B2B2C “embedded investing” solution, DriveWealth’s partners include fintechs, traditional financial institutions, and retail brands, among others. The company provides its patented Fracker technology, its proprietary order management system (OMS), within a comprehensive infrastructure, enabling its partners to embed investment capabilities into their own consumer applications. DriveWealth streamlines the end-user experience and enables frictionless account opening so users can start investing immediately.

Prior to DriveWealth’s Fracker technology, investors had to trade during trade windows. To complicate matters, trading activity during these windows was often largely driven by historical data sets and predictive analytics. While this perhaps worked for investors of yesteryear, much of today’s global, 24/7 business landscape happens outside the confines of U.S. market trading hours – and it requires a new level of certainty and an almost instantaneous transaction speed.

The Fracker was designed and built to execute trades and facilitate orders as they come in. Through the power of its patented OMS, DriveWealth became one of the first companies in the world to launch real-time fractional trading in U.S. equities.

Through the power of the Fracker, DriveWealth’s partners’ customers are able to invest in fractional shares without the burden of high minimums and whole shares. This means investors from all over the world have the power to place orders of any size, for any asset, in any currency.

DriveWealth’s end-to-end technology solution uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to make it easy for its partners to implement innovative experiences and connect their customers with the markets in new ways. The company provides its partners with more than just a technology layer: a dedicated team of experts also supports the integration process through product design, development, launch, and post-launch support.

DriveWealth’s award-winning APIs, fully integrated brokerage, clearing capabilities, and proven infrastructure are designed to support tens of millions of consumers who access U.S. equities from today’s most recognizable fintechs and neobanks, including Block’s Cash App, Revolut, Chipper Cash, Toss Securities, GBM, and Navy Federal.

Through DriveWealth’s APIs, its partners can offer innovative products like stock rewards and round-ups to help customers invest as they spend – an investing experience that’s driving next-gen and first-time investors to the markets. DriveWealth also offers extended hours of trading so investors around the world can access the markets, regardless of their time zone.

DriveWealth has built a platform that is flexible and customizable to the needs of businesses and their customers. DriveWealth’s partners also use its technology to offer automatic rebalancing, robo-investing, retirement savings vehicles, HSA experiences, and alternatives.

DriveWealth’s Autopilot Portfolio Management Tool makes it easy to create, manage and rebalance customer portfolios. Simply select the investments, set the target asset allocation, establish drift parameters and rebalancing frequency—and DriveWealth’s technology will do the rest.

DriveWealth built DriveHub to help its partners manage customer accounts across the entire investment lifecycle. DriveHub is a comprehensive dashboard that gives partners a 360-degree view of user accounts, orders, settlement and clearing, operations, servicing, and reporting.

DriveWealth operates as a licensed broker-dealer, providing clearing and settlement on behalf of its fintech customers, which handle the consumer experience and apps. DriveWealth also provides custody for individual accounts and stocks through its APIs.

While the Company started with stocks, DriveWealth also offers crypto investing infrastructure. In February 2022, DriveWealth announced the acquisition and launch of two wholly-owned subsidiaries, DriveLiquidity and DriveDigital, as the company unveiled its plans to offer cryptocurrencies to partners and their retail investors.

Following the completed acquisition of Crypto-Systems, DriveWealth’s subsidiary DriveLiquidity provides DriveWealth with the capability to trade cryptocurrencies on a proprietary basis using its algorithmic solutions. DriveLiquidity acts as a liquidity provider, both to DriveWealth and to other cryptocurrency venues. DriveWealth launched DriveDigital as its cryptocurrency exchange platform as part of the company’s end-to-end crypto strategy. Together, DriveWealth offers an API-driven crypto experience in order to seamlessly connect its partners’ retail investors to the cryptocurrency marketplace.

In 2021, DriveWealth doubled its customer base year-over-year, with 140% growth in international partners and an over 150% increase in headcount.

In December 2020, DriveWealth acquired Cuttone & Co., one of the largest independent brokerage firms on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) trading floor. Through Cuttone―now called DriveWealth Institutional (DWI)―DriveWealth offers partners information, insights, custom algorithmic trading strategies, prime brokerage, options execution, and fixed income trading, as well as unique order types that are only available to floor brokers on the NYSE.

DriveWealth has been recognized for its achievements as the category leader that is redefining investing through 10 of the most prominent industry awards.

In 2022, the firm was named to the 2022 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 ranking, the 2022 Forbes Fintech 50 List, the CB Insights Fintech 250 for the second consecutive year, and the WealthTech 100, in addition to receiving a Benzinga 2022 Global Fintech Award, among others. Emily Ellis, Head of People, was also recognized with an Inspiring Fintech Female Award from NYC Fintech Women.

DriveWealth recently partnered with Adaptive Financial Consulting to build a new proprietary order management system (OMS) to address increased demand in its retail brokerage business. This high-throughput, low-latency OMS, which leverages Aeron technology, was recognized as 2022’s Best Collaboration/Alliance Initiative by Waters Technology’s American Financial Technology Awards.

The firm was listed as a 2022 New Jersey Top Workplace. Built In also honored the firm in its Best Places to Work Awards as one of its Best Midsize Companies to Work For and Best Paying Companies in New York City for the second consecutive year.

Founder Bob Cortright said, “DriveWealth’s significant global growth this year can be directly attributed to the flexible scalability and customization of our platform’s APIs. We look forward to remaining the primary industry choice for fintechs who are looking to empower their customers with innovative investing solutions worldwide.”

These industry accolades built upon several milestones that DriveWealth achieved in 2022, including DriveWealth's expansion of its executive team with notable appointments of Google and PayPal executives. Gayathri Rajan joined as Chief Product Officer (CPO), and Harshal Deo joined as Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Gayathri joins DriveWealth following a 16-year stint at Google where she founded Google’s payments platform, which manages the entirety of Google’s payments and disbursements, and more recently built out the high-growth enterprise business for Google Maps.

Harshal comes to DriveWealth after a combined 16 years working at eBay and PayPal where he pioneered the use of AI for fraud detection. At PayPal, he ran a global engineering and product organization that enabled PayPal’s entry into shopping and delivered the PayPal Commerce Platform for Businesses, enabling seamless commerce for over 20 million businesses worldwide.

DriveWealth built upon key partnerships in Europe (Bank of Georgia) and Asia Pacific (Toss Securities), in addition to launching new partnerships in underserved markets such as Africa (Chipper Cash) and Latin America (Sproutfi) to expand affordable access to investing. In addition to notable new partnerships, DriveWealth expanded its global footprint by establishing presences in Singapore, London, Dublin, Lithuania, and Brazil to support partners and retail investors globally.

DriveWealth’s Fracker®, its proprietary OMS that has reinvented the retail investing experience for millions worldwide, was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

In addition to launching two wholly-owned subsidiaries, DriveDigital and DriveLiquidity, to offer cryptocurrency capabilities to partners and their retail investors, the company launched its Developer Dashboard to enable developers to gain free, instant access to the same resilient and scalable APIs that DriveWealth’s partners access in a sandbox environment.

Finally, the firm expanded its DriveAdvisory platform, a technology infrastructure solution that empowers partners to fully integrate financial advisory products into their existing apps.

In October 2022, DriveWealth was named to CB Insights Fintech 250 List in the trading and infrastructure category for the second year in a row. This list recognizes the most promising private fintech companies in the world.

In October 2022, DriveWealth announced the Fracker, the proprietary order management system (OMS), was officially granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It’s a big milestone for technology that has reinvented the retail investing experience for millions of people around the world.

In November 2022, DriveWealth was named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. The list recognizes 500 of the most innovative, fastest-growing companies across the technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech sectors in North America. Award winners are recognized as innovative technology companies that redefine the cutting edge and disrupt the technology industry.

In April 2023, DriveWealth announced the launch of the DriveWealth ICE 100 Index ETF (Symbol: CETF). This new ETF is the first investment product built off of the ICE DriveWealth 100 Index which uses unique, proprietary methodology to select the top 100 US-listed ETFs based on size, liquidity and risk-adjusted return. “ETFs represent an important investment opportunity for all types of investors – from Baby Boomers to Gen Z,” comments Bob Cortright, CEO/Founder of DriveWealth. “Our partners are now able to offer their investors a way to seek access to the top 100 ETFs in the US through a single investment product.”

In July 2023, DriveWealth announced that they are expanding the range of tradeable asset classes on DriveWealth. DriveWealth's partners can now build options trading experiences all within their investing APIs. With this first launch, customers can buy call and put contracts for thousands of stocks and ETFs.

In July 2023, DriveWealth announced the appointment of Michael Blaugrund as Global Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Robert Cortright, the DriveWealth founder and current CEO, will transition to the role of Executive Chairman in which he will continue to shape the strategic vision at DriveWealth. Blaugrund joins DriveWealth from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) where he most recently served as Chief Operating Officer, overseeing strategy and operations of the NYSE Group's five equity exchanges and two options exchanges. Joining NYSE in 2016, he was responsible for the exchange's trading and data businesses, including all aspects of product development, commercial policy, market structure positioning and relationship management. Prior to NYSE, Blaugrund was the Director of Business Development at Tower Research Capital, where he was responsible for expanding the firm's global market access and developing strategic assets. He also previously led U.S. equity product strategy at NASDAQ and held product management roles at Thomson Reuters. He previously served on the boards of SIAC, the Options Clearing Corporation, and tZERO.

According to Axios, in August 2023, DriveWealth is aiming to file for an IPO within 18 to 24 months. DriveWealth has recently laid the groundwork, ushering in Michael Blaugrund as CEO in late July after hiring Jason Pizzorusso as global CFO in June. "I think the next time you see us doing a fundraising, it's ringing the bell in the New York Stock Exchange," says Blaugrund. DriveWealth grew revenue by 55% last year despite a post-pandemic slowdown in retail stock trading, interim-CEO Cortright says, and it expects to grow by a similar percentage this year. It also expects to be cash flow positive by year-end — or at least by the end of first quarter 2024. In the long term, Blaugrund sees the potential for DriveWealth to be "a central nervous system for delivering financial services." That could mean offering data products around retail investment activity on its platform or helping corporations with stock buybacks. The embedded stock trading fintech attributes its continued growth to its B2B model. DriveWealth sells to companies — including Revolut and Toss Securities — enabling those businesses to offer stock trading to their consumers. Known for its fintech clientele, DriveWealth has increasingly been targeting enterprises. It now counts BTG Pactual, Latin America's largest bank, as a customer. The company did not reveal its revenue and MAU figures, but Cortright says the business will be "well" into the $200 million to $500 million revenue range in 2025 or 2026.