SnapTrade's Brendan Wood Challenges High-Fee Investing Norms: Meet Him At Benzinga's Fintech Event In NYC

Brendan Wood is a co-founder and CEO of SnapTrade – a fintech API solutions provider.

Wood is an experienced robotics engineer who specializes in software and high-performance computing. He started his career by interning at the Canadian Space Agency and worked across various engineering roles, notably as part of the R&D team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Before SnapTrade, he was a CTO at Priceonomics – a data analytics and content marketing platform.

On Nov. 13 in NYC, Wood will participate in Benzinga's Fintech Deal Day conference. Alongside Robinhood's Steve Quirk, he will discuss the latest fintech technologies in a panel titled "Improving Market Accessibility: The Future of Trading Platforms and Tools."

Several years ago, Wood met an entrepreneur, Brendan Lee Young. Together, they perceived a problem in the active investing space – high fees without corresponding returns.

After crunching the numbers, the duo quickly realized these high management expense ratio services significantly slowed their portfolio growth. Since saving for retirements heavily relies on compounding, any costs incurred on the way (especially early on) would postpone their retirements.

Thus, they turned to passive investing – a strategy that buys and holds index funds. Without active management, the fees involved were about 10 times lower than those for actively managed investments like mutual funds.

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Still, passive investors usually fall into two categories: those who keep it simple and pay a fee for a robo-advisor and those who do everything themselves. Wood and Young decided that they would find a compromise by offering a solution that minimizes both fees and time spent on investing.

They launched a web app that helps manage portfolios and maintain a desired target allocation by calculating the trades needed based on the targets and cash available. Honoring the strategy, they named the app Passiv.

"We're building Passiv to try to reduce tedious things you need to do to manage your investments like a robot advisor would," Wood said while appearing on The Personal Finance Show podcast.

Since Passiv needed a bridge between itself and brokerages that supplied customers' data, Wood built SnapTrade – an application programming interface (API).

"There are a lot of investing apps similar to Passiv, and some are quite different, but the key thing that would make them all better is brokerage integration – being able to connect to brokerage accounts and help people manage their money where it is, rather than having to move it to a new service. So that's the new direction the company is taking," he told Huddle.

With SnapTrade, users can connect their accounts to an app, allowing them to view real-time asset holdings, study their transaction data, and place trades through the app. SnapTrade authentication is highly secure and offers persistent API connections to ensure reliability for end users.

Eventually, these efforts didn't go unnoticed, and they received funding from Y Combinator – one of the largest global startup accelerators.

"It's a game-changer for us, and it's changed how we envision ourselves as a company. What we thought we could do was lower until we got in and realized the sky is the limit," Wood noted.

What better place than Benzinga's Fintech Deal Day & Awards event to learn more about FinTech platforms and their tools to improve traders' security and user experiences? Join Benzinga's Future of Digital Assets in NYC on Nov. 14, 2023, to stay updated on trends like AI, regulations, SEC actions & institutional adoption in the crypto space. Secure early bird discounted tickets now!

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