Money20/20 Special: DriveWealth CIO Talks Post-Pandemic Visions, Expansion

Money20/20’s latest in-person conference was held Oct. 24-27 at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Amidst all the recognition and networking, Benzinga had the opportunity to speak with Harry Temkin, the chief information officer at DriveWealth, a pioneer in fractional investing and embedded financial services.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Benzinga: Tell me about your background, Harry. How did you get involved in the space?

Temkin: I graduated in 1989 and went right to a broker-dealer. From there, I was introduced to a really cool market data company that also happened to have a broker-dealer. It sold its research that way called Bridge Information Systems and I ended up eventually running all of product for that company.

It led me to Reuters and then, we bought Bridge, and I ran global equities.

When did DriveWealth come into the picture?

Eventually, I went off and did some entrepreneurial work. I ended up finding DriveWealth and joined in 2015 as chief information officer. Then, I had a very interesting opportunity to follow the CEO to eBay.

I missed the innovation of DriveWealth and the things that we were trying to accomplish, and it drew me back.

What is DriveWealth’s mission?

To democratize equity investing. We really want to reach every new investor, wherever they may be in the world, and so we built technology in the cloud.

What’s the value-add that DriveWealth can bring?

We enable our partners to do cool bonus programs where if every time I buy a Starbucks Corporation SBUX latte, 10% of it goes to buy Starbucks stock.

Our technology, when we partner with next-generation digital banks and wallets, is enabling the underbanked or unbanked community to have access to investing tools that just weren’t accessible to them, previously.

Reaching the underserved. How do you do it?

Showing the community that they can trust the technology and partner. We’re trying to work with our partners and help educate their customers on the value of long-term investing and dollar-cost averaging, or the ability to invest with just pennies.

How do you stay competitive and compliant?

The barrier to entry is that you need sophisticated licenses.

I also think there are unique elements to our technology stack, in the way we enable our partners to seamlessly transform money into investible assets and vice versa.

What excites you most as we come out of the pandemic?

We just closed on a significant Series D. It was a $450 million raise that valued the company just shy of $3 billion. We have a significant amount of capital to accelerate our business.

Today, we are the market leader in U.S. equity investing and we certainly want to expand our offering into other asset classes, whether that be crypto, or options, or international securities.