DriveWealth
DriveWealth provides the following sets of APIs:
Front-end APIs that allow financial advisors to provide onboarding, execution, clearing, etc.
Back-end APIs that allow financial advisors to monitor their customer activity from their own dashboard in real time.
According to Robert Cortright, CEO at DriveWealth, these sets of APIs allow advisors to create a sophisticated product and not have to worry about its implementation on the back-end. All they need to think about is the customer experience.
All their APIs have a JSON format, and are REST-based and SALT-secure. Harry Temkin, CIO at DriveWealth, commented,
“Every client is given a specific API key that they must use for each of their requests alongside of an additional session key that is granted on a per-session basis. That session key is only valid for a single user. It must be accompanied by a specific API key that we grant the customer, and so the combination of those two pieces across an SSL-encrypted request is how our clients engage with us at this point in time.”
DriveWealth is continually enhancing its API set based on customers’ requests and the products that they’re trying to build. Harry said, “We’ve recently built out a series of JavaScript APIs, JavaScript toolkits that make it easier for a customer who’s building a web-based application to work with our APIs.”
According to the company’s CIO, DriveWealth is servicing five to seven million API requests per day. “But the system is scaled in such a way that if we see a significant increase in the number of calls coming from the system, we can easily scale up and handle it.”
DriveWealth plans to build portfolio management APIs that will allow registered investment advisors (RIAs) to effectively manage their customers’ portfolios. Harry explained, “The APIs would provide a system whereby the client doesn’t need to do the rebalancing and drift factor calculations. We can provide that service, so effectively an API would allow a client to define the portfolio that they are providing to their customers, or a series of portfolios that the client is specifically assigned to. Through an API, RIAs tell the system how often they want to check the portfolio allocation, what the drift factor is that would trigger a rebalancing event, and a series of parameters around it. And the system would realistically do all of the rebalancing and trading for the customers.”
Hydrogen, designed by the Hedgeable team
Hedgeable has created the Hydrogen platform with API-based functionality. Mike Kane, CIO and co-Founder at Hedgeable, explained,
“Our whole platform is just an API that third parties use. Typically we’re not doing the implementation for our clients, but we’re providing them with all the APIs they need. We’re helping people by providing all the infrastructure API activity and API financial calculations. People who are using us are looking for an API architecture, and they’re looking to build applications using an API, versus coming to a custom software provider.”
The company offers E2E APIs that allow users to provide specific functionality (e.g., goal planning, goal investing, onboarding), automate certain actions (e.g., sending alerts, pulling marketing information), or build an application on top of the Hydrogen platform. According to Mike there are about 400 endpoints on the API set, and these may be used to build five different kinds of platforms, including wealth, investing, savings, wellness, and insurance.