While U.S. investors may harbor doubts on the market direction due to the ongoing pandemic, global investors still consider the U.S. the best place to invest.
Even as the nation’s attempts to address Covid-19 are seemingly faltering, U.S.-based securities are more popular than ever, said Bob Cortright, DriveWealth’s CEO.
“Covid is actually accelerating demand, the pandemic lit a fire to the demand,” he said. “People are getting more comfortable doing all of their financial services via a digital device. We used to onboard 40,000 to 50,000 customers a week, but last month (June) we did 500,000 accounts on board in one month.”
DriveWealth recently reported that trading volume on its platform increased by 214% from the first quarter to the second quarter, with investors over age 60 opening more accounts than those under age 60, evidence that the outbreak helped drive fintech adoption among older investors.
After anticipating that more of the world’s investing class would adopt technology as their preferred medium for interacting with their finances, In 2010 Cortright set out build a platform that would give investors from other countries access to the U.S. securities market, and DriveWealth was born.
Since 2010, roboadvisors like Betterment and WealthFront, self-directed trading apps like Robinhood and personal finance and investing apps like Stash have adopted technology similar to DriveWealth’s.
“These new businesses are offering unique and engaging front-end experiences for customers,” said Cortright. “The evolution of finance is going to be even more sophisticated than that, ultimately, because the old infrastructure isn’t going to hold up. The new firms can’t create new and engaging experiences their customers want – and already expect from their experiences with e-commerce – on that old infrastructure, so we set out to build a new e-commerce-like infrastructure for the brokerage experience – but it’s not so much about the brokers as it is embedded finance.”
Embedded finance refers to an ecosystem around wallets and applications than enable a one-stop-shop experience for investors.
DriveWealth got its start working in China and other areas external to the U.S. and is only now seeing adoption within the states. Currently, it works with European apps like Revolut and DigitalWallet, Appsecurity in Latin America and EasyEquities in South Africa, as well as U.S. entities like MoneyLion, Digit, Stack, CashApp, Navy Federal Credit Union and TIAA.
“Originally we were built for fintech,” said Cortright. “Fintechs have been great at focusing on the user experience: They’re engaging, user-friendly and frictionless. This is going to transcend into the legacy players as well, because they want to provide the same experience, but being so product-centric for most of their lives, they’re not good at customer experiences.”