Bill Capuzzi, CEO of Apex Fintech Solutions, on the critical infrastructure powering modern investing

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Today, I sit down with Bill Capuzzi, CEO of Apex Fintech Solutions, to explore the critical infrastructure powering modern fintech investing. Bill shares the fascinating journey of Apex from its roots as a pioneer in API-enabled clearing to fractional share trading and becoming the clearing firm behind investment accounts for close to 25 million people across household names like Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment.

The conversation dives deep into what it takes to be a reliable infrastructure player in fintech, from opening accounts in seconds, to enabling investment globally, to Apex’s bold expansion plans with State Street and their strategic embrace of stablecoins. Bill also pulls back the curtain on how Apex uses AI inside the company and shares his perspective on the complex plumbing that makes seamless, modern fintech experiences possible. It’s a rare inside look at the unsexy but essential backbone of the fintech revolution.

In this podcast, you will learn:

• Bill’s interesting journey from environmental scientist to fintech entreprenuer.
• Why he decided to join Apex ten years ago.
• How their capabilities were so different to the traditional custodians.
• What a clearing broker does exactly.
• How the idea for fractional share trading came about.
• How they have built their brand in the fintech space.
• Why they are seeing interest from banks and traditional wealth providers today.
• The only two firms that have left Apex and why they left.
• How they are working with the digital assets/stablecoins space today.
• Why they sold Apex Crypto to Bakkt in 2022.
• How they are growing internationally.
• What their partnership with State Street means for Apex.
• What Apex is doing to prepare for the AI-enabled future.
• What Bill is most excited about for the future of Apex.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

Fintech One on One Podcast No. 557: Bill Capuzzi

Bill Capuzzi:

Apex was the, or one of the pioneers around fractional shares for equities and fixed income. And the idea came from our customer. And I say our customer, there was one client in particular that came to us and said, hey, could you do something with this set of shares? Can you do something with dollars? We just, we’re gonna go back to the symbiotic relationship between a SoFi and an Apex. Our job is to make them look amazing. right, and listen to the customer, right? A novel, novel thought. But you know, this client came to us and said, Hey, what do you think about this notion of fractional shares? And then the question is, okay, what do do with this? And the reality was, we could build the technology behind the scenes, you still have to go to market and buy one share, two shares, five years, the market doesn’t recognize fractional shares. But at Apex, I could take in that, you I mentioned a $50 order in Tesla.

Peter Renton:

This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives.

In this episode, I am delighted to welcome to the show Bill Capuzzi, the CEO of Apex Fintech Solutions. Now, if you’ve opened an account with Robinhood, SoFi or Betterment, or dozens of other fintech platforms, you’ve likely encountered Apex behind the scenes. They’re the custodian and clearing firm powering the investment accounts for close to 25 million people today. Bill shares his fascinating journey from environmental scientist to leading one of the most important infrastructure players in fintech. He explains exactly what a clearing broker does and how Apex helped democratize investing by enabling features that we now take for granted, like opening accounts in seconds and buying fractional shares. We dive into their work with crypto and stable coins, their global expansion plans with State Street and how they’re using AI inside the company. It’s a rare look inside the critical plumbing that makes modern fintech investing possible. Now let’s get on with the show.

PR: Welcome to the podcast, Bill.

BC: Great to see you, Peter.

PR: So, let’s kick things off with a little bit of background. know you’ve been doing Apex for, you know, for quite a while now, but I’d like to hit on just, if you could just go back through your career, you know, hit on some of the highlights.
 

BC: Yeah, sure. so, I’m gonna sort of show my age. this goes way back to the, the nineties. I came out of undergrad, a mountain of debt, and, I really wanted to become a doctor. That was my sort of life’s mission. But the reality was mountain of debt coming out of undergrad and the notion of taking on even more debt, going to med school was just sort of overwhelming.

And so I took a job as an environmental scientist and quickly realized that was not my calling in life. So I had environmental science degree because I had to get my med school requirements. And so I needed to make some money, start paying the bills, and I found myself as a scientist. Quickly learned that was, like I said, not my calling. Still had that mountain of debt. And I stumbled into an opportunity to go work at a local university in New Jersey, at Rutgers University. And the reason I took that job was that you could go to school for free if you worked at the university. And so what does a young guy do that doesn’t really know what to do his career still has a mountain of debt? You go get your MBA for free, which is exactly what I did. I finished, like I said, in the late 90s and still had that mountain of debt. I live in the Tri-State area. Had a roommate from college whose dad worked for a firm called DLJ, which I knew nothing about finance, but his dad said, hey, why don’t you come work with us? We have this MBA program. See if you like it. And at a minimum, we’re going to make a bunch of money. You can help pay down that debt. And so I did. I took that job way back when and fell in love with this kind of wacky world of finance. And in particular, fell in love with sort of the back end of the industry. So DLJ was an investment bank back when it eventually got acquired by Credit Suisse. DLJ owned this firm called Pershing, which if you’re in the industry, Pershing is kind of the OG of custody and clearing. It’s been around forever. And DLJ owned the firm at the time. It’s this young, wet behind the ear, freshly minted, found my way into Jersey City, New Jersey at this company called Pershing, which I had never heard of in my life. And like I said, fell in love through that experience in the back end of the industry. I left there to help found a company in New York called Convergex, but still had this kind of desire to get back into the plumbing side. Convergex was building algorithms for hedge funds. And ran into the folks at Peak Six, Chicago, back in 2014. And they had this little company called Apex that they had acquired the year before. Didn’t really know what to do with it. So I tried to buy it from them in 2014. Unsuccessful, but the founders of Peak Six, Matt Holsteiser, Jenny Just, convinced me to come across and help run this little firm called Apex now a little over 10 years ago. And I promised my wife, Peter, two years, I’ll do this for two years, then I’ll go find something else to do. And here I am 10 plus years later.

PR: So then what did Apex do when you acquired the company, when you first became CEO? there was a very different environment back then. So what were they doing?

BC: Let’s start with why I was attracted to it. So you think about custody and clearing for the audience. That sort of think of, like I said, the back end of the inchworm of sorts. So everything from account opening, funding accounts, confirm statements, tax, cost basis, settling trades, all the plumbing behind the scenes for a retail investor. That’s what a custodian or clearing firm does.

And from my time at Pershing way back when, I knew how valuable it was for firms to do this right. fast forward to today, there really are just a handful less than 10 firms on the planet that can do retail custody and clearing well. And so back then, I saw an opportunity to sort of jump in. And at the same time, think back 10, 12 years ago, the sort of the start of fintech in retail wealth. So here you have this kind of fintech custodian, which doesn’t look like Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing. And you have these clients that are showing up at our doorstep like Wealthfront and Betterment and Robinhood looking for a partner that didn’t look like Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing, right? That was leaning into technology and trying to come up with things like open an account in seconds with no paperwork. And so I want to say it was brilliant strategy right on my part, but it was also lot of luck. It was like right place, right time with the right product.

PR: Right. So when, like when Robinhood and, and Betterment and those, when they were all getting going, that mean obviously they weren’t initially, they were quite reasonably small companies. How did you kind of convince them that you, was it just that you, like you said, you weren’t Schwab or you weren’t, you weren’t a big guy, but how did you convince them to trust you? Cause this is like fundamental to their business.

BC: If you think about today, I think it’d probably be a different conversation, but you’re going back, let’s call it 12 years ago. There was no other alternative. So they could try and build on top of one of the competitors that was out there. But the reality is those competitors didn’t have the technology needed to power what they were needing, what they were looking to do, which is how do I open an account in seconds? And do it at scale. How do I support a client that has $500 in the account? Not $50,000, not $500,000, but $500. And how do I take each piece I mentioned before, account opening and funding conference and statements, cost basis tax, and how do I do it all in an app on a phone? Right. And you know, we take it for granted today. Here we are 2025 going to 26.But back in 2012, 13, 14, there really weren’t a lot of those types of opportunities.

And the second part I say is they were builders. They were all builders. They thought about the world through this lens. They’re going to build a product. And Apex was sort of built as an API first, We continue to be today, but an API based platform, which, you know, think back 2012, we were a one of one. And fast forward today, in large part, are continuing to be that sort of one-of-one uses APIs as kind of the way that we kind of lean into wealth.
 

PR: Right, right. Okay. So, before we dive more deeply into this, I do want to get a sense of exactly what is involved with what a clearing broker does exactly. Like I get opening an account, but maybe you can just take us through someone is, you know, depositing money into, into Robinhood or whoever, and then conducting a stock trade. What is it that the clearing broker does?

BC: So think of it as a sort of proverbial man or woman behind the curtain. So this is where there’s this amazing symbiotic relationship. So SoFi is the client of APEX today. So what ends up happening is SoFi focuses on the UI, the UX, the end client experience. That is their focus. How do I put something out there that an end consumer finds attractive?

So they control the B2C side of the relationship. Behind the scenes, so Peter comes onto SoFi, pull up the screen, it says, hey, Peter, you want to open an account? Yes. Great. You type in your information and you press go. So what that does now, they captured that information on their front end and it fires through real time through an API to Apex where we take Peter’s information, and we real time interrogate that against a number of sophisticated databases to ensure that we pass all the OFAC and KYC AML requirements. And immediately assuming you are who you say you are, we’re going to pass back an account number and say, Peter, you’re good to go. Account open in seconds. The second thing is, now Peter says, count’s open. I want to actually move money in. Same thing. You’re on the SoFi screen. You type in your bank information. Apex is now going to grab that bank information and make a real time connection between, let’s say you’re a Bank of America client and now this newly opened SoFi account. So now open the account. You’ve now funded the account real time. So money’s moved directly into that account. I want to buy $50 worth of Tesla.

So third step. All real time, this is all happening right in sort of in sequence. You put in an order, $50 that you’ve now moved into that account. And I want to buy a fractional share trade of Tesla. I’m not going to buy shares. I’m to buy $50 worth of stock. Then you go onto SoFi, you put in the order, you pull ticker and that order now fires through to Apex. I then take it to the market. I get it executed on behalf of SoFi and you as the end customer. And now real time, you’re now looking in that same SoFi account you just opened and boom, there’s your shares of Tesla, right? Fractional shares, $50 worth of stock. Once you do that…So then once you do that, you have to get a confirm, right? It’s a requirement in the United States to get what’s called a 10 B 10 confirm. You’re going to get a statement at the end of the month because there was a transaction. You have a tax report right at the end of the year. So all of those things is what a custodian does, a clearing firm does on behalf of SoFi or Stash or Webull. And they do it on behalf of them the end customer.

PR: Okay. That’s very helpful. you. so then fractional investing, like fractional shares, that was not a thing. don’t, mean, I don’t know when that, was probably in the late 2010s, I’m guessing when that came in from memory, but when you would have started working with like Robinhood and stuff, don’t think that was a possibility. So how was that transition to, and to, get into before it was, you had to, you had to buy a whole share. Like if you want to Berkshire Hathaway, you had to plonk down six figures if you wanted their Class A shares. Tell us a little bit about the technology that was needed to bring fractional share ownership.

BC: I think the first part of it is where did the idea come from? Apex was the, or one of the pioneers around fractional shares for equities and fixed income. And the idea came from our customer. And I say our customer, there was one client in particular that came to us and said, hey, could you do something with this set of shares? Can you do something with dollars? We’re gonna go back to the symbiotic relationship between a SoFi and an Apex. Our job is to make them look amazing. Listen to the customer, right? A novel thought, but this client came to us and said, hey, what do you think about this notion of fractional shares? And then the question is, okay, what do you do with this? And the reality was we could build the technology behind the scenes. You still have to go to market and buy one share, two shares, five shares. The market doesn’t recognize a fractional share. But at Apex, I could take in that, I mentioned a $50 order in Tesla. I could go to the market and buy, let’s just say, the equivalent $50 was gonna buy you 2.2 shares. I’ll buy the three shares from the market. I will then attribute 2.2 shares to Peter and the other 8 10ths of the share I’ll hold in inventory, right, until the next person that wants to buy it and I’ll use those shares to fill somebody else. So it was about building some pretty sophisticated technology you’re talking about now. 10 years ago, it’s obviously evolved since then, but 10 years ago, it was complicated to do, right? And that’s sort of the ethos of Apex is lean into hard problems using technology, right? And then, you know, being able to provide that out to the 250 clients that use Apex as that custodian clearing firm.

PR: Right. Okay. So, you know, it’s interesting because I do see, um, the Apex name around quite a bit when I’m, you know, I have lots of accounts at different fintechs and, you know, um, I, it’s one of reasons why I wanted to do this interview because I, keep seeing you around. Like I just, I just recently moved my wife’s 401k over to public and sure enough, there was Apex, uh, of, um, doing the, had to make out the check to you, to you guys when we took it out of the 401k. But you know, most people don’t know who you are. Like you’re not a retail brand. mean, what, how have you kind of built your brand so the players that, that are important to you know who you are.

Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky. And it’s tricky because really our job as a platform, think of us as a platform no different than like a Shopify, right, is really to make you mentioned public, to make public look great. Right. And so as this platform, we really sit behind the scenes and enable that brand public. The tricky part about it, though, Peter, is you mentioned your wife. We hold her money. We’re the custodian. actually are responsible for your wife’s account on our books. So the cash and the securities are actually held within APEX. And so I think there is a desire on my part and I think in the firm’s part to continue to build that brand in large part because today we have close to 25 million people whose money and securities we hold as an organization.

And so marrying that or sort of getting that right, the mix between us being the sort of man or woman behind the curtain and supporting those B2C brands, but also having that brand at the end consumer, when they get a statement or a confirm says, oh, okay, I know who Apex is, right? They understand what we do as an organization. That’s a work in progress for us as an organization. One of the reasons over the last, you know, whatever it is, four years, we flirted with an IPO. Not necessarily because we wanted to raise the money, but because I feel like we have an obligation for us to have much more of a presence from a name perspective, because like I said, we have close to 25 million people that rely on us. But it’s a delicate balance. You think about Shopify as a good example. It’s the merchant that the end consumer is interacting with. in that case, Shopify is acting as a sort platform behind. Same concept here in terms of us supporting those B2C brands.

PR: I’m curious about like when you’re going out there now, people, I said most companies in FinTech would know who you are, I’m curious about whether you’re actually talking with banks today. Cause I see some banks talking about we need to, we need to keep the customer. Let’s, let’s add some, let’s add like a whole investment program in there. mean, are you seeing in the last few years that more banks are interested than they were before?

BC: Yeah, I think as you said, there’s not a fintech out there if they want to offer a retail wealth product that doesn’t know to come to Apex. Right. And so we don’t we don’t miss much in terms of people that are looking to do something on the fintech side. What’s happening is that that success over the course of the last 10 years is now started to move into the banks and the traditional wealth providers. And why?

The reality is, typically those banks, those wealth advisors cater to the high net worth, right? Someone that has $500,000 or a million dollars as a minimum. And what’s happening is the world’s changing, right? And what traditionally happened in the past is somebody had small account, did it themselves, whether it was a robo or self-directed platform. And if you got real money, you handed a check to an advisor. And what we’re starting to see now is this convergence happen where the fintechs are adding human advice to their platform. We talked about Robinhood a couple of times. You can see what they’re doing, which is they’re evolving with their customers and they’re adding more traditional services to what was historically a fintech platform. On the other side, you’re now, you know, we’re in really interesting spot where the traditional players are catching wind of what’s happening and are trying to lean hard into the fintech kind of world and adding more digital capabilities to their platform. And obviously Apex, given our background, given the history of the company is in a perfect spot to help those banks, those traditional advisors add a more digital solution set. And the cool part about the world we live in is it’s not a winner take all. What I mean by that is that bank or that traditional wealth advisor can continue to use Schwab or Fidelity, but add Apex as another partner really to kind of focus on how do they help the digital channel within that thing in that particular firm or bank.

PR: I know in my research here, I discovered that Robinhood and Wealthfront are no longer using you guys. They’ve built their own clearing broker in-house, it seems. then, and obviously they’ve got massive scale, those companies. so I’m just curious, do you see Apex as sort of an enabler to help FinTech companies get, or even banks now to get to large scale? And once they’re at a certain scale, it makes sense for them to bring this in-house or how do you, how do you sort of view that transition?

BC: It’s a good question. I think over the course of APEX, now whatever, I mentioned 12 years, the two firms that have left and done it themselves has been those two. And then, despite the fact there’s other firms that are as large, maybe not as large as Robinhood, but certainly large in the wealth front that have stayed with APEX. And part of it is the world’s change around technology, I mentioned that before, but Robinhood sort of said, hey, we need to do this ourselves and then built effectively spent over two or three years building out the capabilities. And through that time was a distraction. You think back to 2019, 20, 21, they ran into major issues around their platform and some of the things around meme stocks. And I think today there’s much more of a sort of an inclination by our clients to get to that scale and have a variable cost versus taking on all the technology. And so we built out a bunch of technology to allow them to get better scale, get better economics without having to take on all that risk, the capital outlay and the technology build that somebody like a Robinhood or a Wealthfront did now going back seven years ago.

And so since that time, your wealth front left, really we had disagreement on pricing. Robinhood left in 2018. And since that time, really no one’s left Apex as a result. And part of it is the technology continues to evolve. And like I said, to the extent you don’t have to do this, if we do our job and we get the pricing right and provide them the ability to scale, there’s no reason to take on all that backend plunk. That’s the whole job of a platform.

PR: Yep. Yep. Now that makes sense. It makes sense. So I want to talk about crypto because as we’re recording this, both Bitcoin and Ethereum are floating with all time highs. Crypto has become a pretty, you know, more established asset class certainly than ever before. I’ve seen that you do offer services for the crypto space, but is this a really small part of your business? I mean, you’re leaning into this. Where are you at with crypto?

BC: I think you’re starting with, we say crypto, let’s put a broader bucket called DeFi, decentralized finance. then within DeFi, think, think of it as in kind of three buckets. You have stable coin, right? So we talked about funding, funding rails. now let’s get outside the US and start thinking about other countries. People using stable coin, let’s use USDC as a means to fund a brokerage account, right? So on ramps and off ramps. So that’s kind of one part that we’re leaning hard into. And we offer the ability for people to use stable coins, fund their brokerage account. The second, like you said, you know, investible asset crypto. I want to buy or sell Ethereum or Bitcoin. And then the third one, which is sort of emerging now is this notion of tokenizing a security.

Taking a public security, let’s use, you know, we mentioned Tesla before, and actually creating a digital form on the blockchain of that public security. So Apex, again, as this platform, our job, think about crypto as just another investable asset. And our, you know, sort of job now is to how do you integrate that in a safe, secure, know, kind of compliant, you know, from a law and regulation standpoint.

Do it in a safe and secure way on behalf of our customer and then ultimately the end customer. And I think it’s interesting, Peter, so I’ve been at this a long time. So we built out Apex crypto 2019 and sold that business to a public company called Bakkt in 2022. And why, why do we do that? You know, the regulatory regime, it’s pretty amazing to watch the sort of how things have evolved, but under Gensler’s sort of regime, you couldn’t touch crypto with a 10-foot pole. And the risk for us, as I said before, safety and security is the kind of number one mantra for the firm is the risk in and around crypto as an investable asset in 2022 was very high.

Fast forward to 2024, we have a change in office in DC and we’re off to the races again. And what changed? It was obviously a regulatory or governmental change that then sort of kicked off a change at the SEC and crypto has kind of burst back on the scenes ever since. a practitioner, sort of sitting in my seat, the CEO of Apex, it’s an investable asset, right? What you need to do is make sure that the FTXs, those situations that did happen through that period don’t reoccur, right? And make sure that there’s safety and security and that there’s framework, which I do appreciate by the US government saying, we’re not going to stick our heads in the sand, but we are going to create a framework around this to make sure that we protect the investor. And so we end up in a position today where I think that, like I said, USDC or the stable coin as an alternative to the current rails. Think about real time payments. Today, ACH is not a real time or Fedwire is not a real time system. Stablecoin, sending money over stablecoins is a real time payment mechanism. So it’s a really viable alternative.

Buying crypto assets as an investable asset is good. Like I have, I don’t know if you have kids, Peter, I have young kids who are looking, you know, ways to differentiate and invest. And I keep telling them that, you know, some percentage, 5-10 % of their portfolios as a 23 year old should be in and around, you know, DeFi around crypto. And then last part, which I think is really interesting is to watch the evolution of this tokenization of securities.

There’s rules and regulations that don’t allow it to happen in the US today. But I do think what I’m watching down in DC is that we’ll see, continue to see change that’s going to allow for more of this over time. How does that manifest itself? Think Peter, today you buy a security, we settle that trade T plus one. So that means that you bought the security today, it actually doesn’t settle for 24 hours. Using tokenization, using blockchain will allow us to real time settle. All so you buy it instantaneous just like you would on you bought Bitcoin or Ethereum.

PR:  You primarily just operate inside the U S right? Do you have, do you have international companies that, um, cause I mean, obviously it’s different countries have very different laws when it comes to clearing and that sort of thing. So you, are you really focusing just on US companies?

BC: We support about…we have clients in about 170 different countries So now the reality is most if not all those people want to invest in the United States So the biggest That’s right the biggest part of our growth As a company has come from outside the US and I’ll give you an example Brazil right almost every one of the large banks in Brazil uses Apex for their sort of mass affluent type of client. So everything’s on a phone and they needed sophisticated APIs, they came to APEX for those types of solutions. So a huge part of our growth is coming from outside the US, meaning international clients that want access to US market. We recently, I think the second part of it, which is a go-forward basis, we recently announced a partnership with State Street and that is to take Apex and make it global. All right. So today, predominantly we settle, we do all those things that talk about custody, clearing open accounts and funding and all those for the U.S. market. State Street has local settlement capabilities in about 100 different countries outside the U.S. And so we can take our platform and then partner up with State Street local settlements and sort of take our show on the road of sorts. Right. Do what we do here in the U S and, you know, provide those type of capabilities to places like Spain or Italy or UK or, you Hong Kong or Japan. And that’s the plan over the next 12 to 18 months.

PR: Right. And I imagine with like the whole like USDC type thing, if you said you work with Brazilian banks, lot of Latin America uses stable coins, USDC. So, am I correct in assuming then today someone can move USDC into their brokerage account in Latin America, for example, and then start trading US stocks.

BC: Exactly right. And that’s where, you know, back to the fractional share part here, same concept with stable coin. It was driven by demand and almost exclusively from people outside the U S that are already holding USDC. And what they wanted was to use that without having to sort of do the conversion themselves and then, you know, take the cash and move it in. Why couldn’t we just take the USDC directly? And so over the course of the last few months we sort of built out the capability system to be able to support that.

PR: Okay, so I do want to touch on AI, although we’re running out of time, but I want to make sure we, I’d like to get your thoughts here because there’s a lot of things happening in the AI space around, you know, self-driving money and agentic payments and, you know, managing your money in an automated fashion. We’re not, we’re a long way, I think, from actually making that all a reality, but I’d love to kind of get inside Apex, what are you doing to prepare for an AI enabled future?

BC: Yeah. So we have, which is pretty neat. have about 870, experiments and counting inside. and you know, I say it all the time to my team, which is, if, if they think I’m going to walk in and sprinkle AI pixie dust over the farm and things are magically going to happen, this is not the way it works. Right. And it really is that each person within the company, we have thousand people, they know their corner of APEX better than I ever would. Part of it is AI is a tool, it’s a capability. And you need to be able to obviously provide safe security, put the framework around the tools. You have to teach people, and then it’s, yeah, get to work, use the tools. And so there’s lots of conversations in our industry around products, like you mentioned around, hey, AI co-pilots for how to make investments. And I do think they’re moving a lot faster around those types of products than probably both of us know. But at the core of these companies is how do you, how does it just become part of the fabric of the firm? And so one of those experiments, probably the biggest experiment, I say experiment, but one of the biggest initiatives inside of Apex is that by the end of this year, 50% of all code written in Apex will be written by AI. I mean, that is incredible. Right. We think about, and we’re builders. We have, you know, 600 plus engineers and it’s not about, Hey, I want to cut 600 people to 300. It’s I want to make those people even more effective in building products and delivering solutions. And so to the extent that you can lean into these tools at the core of your company, right? Something like how do you actually use it to become more effective and efficient in delivering amazing products? That is sort of where to start. All these things around products around the edges and how do you become more effective or how do you capture notes? They’re all cute, right? But to me, know, the sort of core, especially for an Apex as this platform is, How does it actually help you become more effective and efficient in delivering great solutions? So 870 some odd experiments. And the cool part is, you can’t walk around the firm without AI being part of the conversation.

PR: That makes sense. Okay. So, so last question then, I mean, you, you joined Apex, said it was going to be a couple of years. It’s been now over a decade. So what are you most excited about for the future of Apex?

BC: Yeah, it was a famous quote from Jeff Bezos, are you a mercenary or a missionary. The mercenaries are ones looking to, you your private equity firm, you’re looking to get a 3X on the original investment, sell the company, move on. Missionaries believe in the purpose. And if you ask any person at Apex, if you run into somebody, Peter, or someone from your the audience runs into an Apex person. Ask them, what is the purpose of your firm? And to a person, they’ll respond that help every person on this planet invest. And so while I’m proud of the fact that we’ve got close to 25 million people that use our platform, think about all the people out there that don’t, that haven’t had the ability to invest. When we start thinking about India and China.

We got a long way to go as a sort of industry. And so the thing I’m most excited about is, is sort of continuing to do the things that we’ve been doing to help people on this planet invest. So if you rewound the tape to when we started, you couldn’t open an account with $500. The products that were available to an end consumer were really tilted toward the rich. Twelve years later, I’m proud of the fact that Apex has helped overuse term of democratized investing. I think all the things that we’ve done in partnership with the wealth fronts and the Robinhoods and the Stash and the SoFis, we pulled some pins in this industry and helped lower the barriers. But we have a long way to go, really long way to go. So, keep doing what we’ve been doing. That’s sort of the mantra inside the company. Listen to the customers, do creative things. All so, you know, we launched 24 hour trading. So you can now buy equities 24 hours a day through Apex, five days a week. All right, the next piece is how do you add Saturday and Sunday? Right, how do you offer options overnight? And that’s from our clients telling us, hey, these are the things that we think would be interesting for the end customer.

So yeah, the long way to go, part of it is we’ve to keep listening, keep building amazing technology.

PR: Okay, well, it’s a good place to leave it, Bill. Really, really appreciate your conversation. What an interesting company that you have created here. You know, it’s important, I think, giving everybody access to the tools that are only available to the wealthy. mean, that’s really what FinTech’s all about. So congratulations on your success today.

BC: Thanks so much, Peter. Thanks for having me.

PR: See ya.

When we stopped recording, Bill and I were chatting about our kids and how different the world is when it comes to investing than it was when we were young adults. The technology Apex has been able to develop has truly democratized investing to the extent that anyone can get started. Want to invest $5 a week in Tesla, Bitcoin or the entire US stock market? That’s no problem today thanks to the work that Apex pioneered.

I haven’t seen hard numbers, but I expect many more young people have brokerage accounts today than they did 10 or 20 years ago. This access alone will enable more people than ever before to participate in the wealth creation engine of major asset classes like the US stock market.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.