Since he was a teen, Sergei was always intrigued by technology and jumped at the chance to join a web team during college at Polytechnic University, now known as NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where he was pursuing a computer science degree. He graduated with honors in 2000 and was tapped to join ViewTrade as one of their first employees where he has since added value to nearly every product ViewTrade has created for fintech firms and financial institutions around the world.
He currently leads the team responsible for client-facing products and services, including onboarding, identity verification, market content services and trading platforms and feeds his passion for learning by completing online business courses from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School.
Pursing Fintech Innovations
Building products is what excites me. Building with the client in mind from the beginning is what makes our products better in the end.
Through the years I’ve had the opportunity to present products to clients in the field and receive immediate and candid feedback. I’ve traveled to different places across Europe, Asia and Central America to gain exposure to clients around the world who each have a different perspective.
I enjoy sitting with customers and hearing firsthand what they need from a business standpoint, and what their clients want from a user experience standpoint. Common themes often emerge.
Oftentimes I receive information directly that I can share with internal teams and implement right away. That is a distinct advantage for customers who choose to work with Orbis Systems. The information flow is direct, we are nimble in our approach to development, and we have the expertise and ambition of a much larger firm.
Over the past two decades I’ve helped firms customize solutions in several ways — from language customization, to nuances in user experience to adding content such as market data, news, or screening tools. Each customer’s wish list is different, and we try to accommodate different segments of clients – from custom turnkey solutions, when a client has to allocate limited technology resources, to a full suite of APIs and SDKs that clients can utilize to build completely custom solutions via their internal teams.
Financial Technology: Key Questions to Ask
Financial Technology vendors are not created equally. If you are a bank, brokerage firm, established fintech firm or a startup seeking a vendor to work with, ask these ten questions before you choose the tech vendor to partner with:
- Does the vendor provide dashboards to keep you in control and give you a snapshot of activity making it easy to manage and monitor or you are only provided with API access?
- Does the vendor give you APIs and expect you to build the product? Or can the vendor also provide customizable client-facing products if your firm is low on resources or needs to go to market quickly?
- Where will records be stored? Is the ecosystem/data transfer secure and accessible from anywhere?
- Does the vendor provide you with all necessary data and connectivity — from different types of real-time data — to content and analytical tools, or do you need to shop around with different vendors to get all necessary pieces to build your product?
- Is your vendor flexible and innovative? Do they constantly improve their products and have the ability to create new functionality or integrate with new data sources, if needed?
- Does your vendor have a lot of existing clients and is the vendor able to utilize economies of scale to offer you third-party content and services at lower prices than if you engaged the same data or service vendor directly?
- What systems are available for risk management, and does the vendor enable you to monitor what is happening?
- To what extent is the vendor improving processes behind the scenes? For example, adding new KYC vendors to their process or implementing continuous enhancements to logic?
- Is the vendor custodian agnostic?
- What operating systems (iOS, Android, etc.) can be accommodated? Does the vendor support both desktop and mobile applications?
Innovating Financial Services
At ViewTrade, we offer the onboarding, trading and administrative solutions firms need to implement U.S. equities and options trading for retail clients around the world. As the technology backbone, we give you freedom to focus your human capital and financial resources on what makes you different. Some firms want everything. Some firms want select offerings. Some want to be in complete control of their user experience, and some prefer to have turnkey solutions. We can accommodate all use cases.
We continually focus on improvement by speaking with clients on the road, identifying and following trends, looking outside the industry for a fresh perspective, attending conferences, and participating in continuing education classes.
If your firm is interesting in exploring options for a trading solution, contact us. We would be happy to share more about how we’ve helped firms like StockTwits, Gatsby and Groww achieve what they set out to accomplish.
