Anastasia Kinski: Hello, I am Anastasia Kinski. I am here at the Alpaca Partners Summit, and I have the pleasure of being joined by Taroun Ajwani, who is the Chief Revenue Officer at Alpaca. Taroun, thank you for joining me.
Taroun Ajwani: Thank you for having me, or rather, thank you for having us.
Anastasia Kinski: Our pleasure, yes. So you have been at Alpaca for a while now, I think over 5 years. You must have seen such extraordinary growth, even just the Partland Summit has grown so much. Um, what, what has been the You're seeing either in the business or in the customer base.
Taroun Ajwani: That's, that's a great question. I'd, I'd, I'd actually do a look back. So we've been doing this conference now for 3 years. This is our 3rd edition. The very first edition started off very heavy with, uh, more fintech style founders who were out trying to build their, uh, their version of Robin Hood where they're drawing inspiration from globally. Um, and then we saw it morph in the second year last year when we were in Kyoto. We went from having our first year, uh, just over 80 people to 125 attendees. There we started to see the mix, uh, evolve where we saw that beyond these, uh, Robin Hood style investing apps, uh, uh, that were inspiring the early founders, they started to now inspire larger legacy institutions to innovate. So we started seeing the mix change from Uh, FinTech founders to also establish organizations, neobanks, uh, established broker dealers around the world attend our summit as well. And then this year is probably the most interesting mix. We have clients from, uh, at least over 25 countries attending. We have, um, a mix of, uh, FinTech First founders, established players who are looking to re-platform, that being one of the emerging themes. Getting off their legacy tech stacks and really I think the valuable part of that is you get a good mix here, good decorum of different perspectives from the early stage startup to the established banking player who's looking for inspiration downwards and the downwards looking upwards.
Anastasia Kinski: It's such an important time that those barriers, you know, the definition between. is sort of blurring simply because that transformation is happening across the board. And talk to me a little bit about how you provide that new infrastructure and I, I, I sort of see alpaca as the new plumbing and that everyone else is building on that digital side. So talk to us a little bit about how you do that.
Taroun Ajwani: Very good question. The, the plumbing, um, our view has always been that we make the plumbing open to everyone, um, because our vision is to open financial services at all. In order to do that, you need to publicly make it available. Um, so oftentimes when we're in a client meeting, we get a request for our sandbox, and we're quick to point. This is publicly available data. Um, anyone can get started, especially in this age of AI. You can quickly download a replit or a lovable app and, uh, you can put in a prompt there or in cloud or open AI. And quickly scan our docs, create a prototype, uh, and really that can all be done in a few minutes, and that is really unique to, to what we built. Uh, we started thinking about and building APIs well over 5-6 years ago, uh, when there wasn't a craze for API-based services, um, and so that's really set us up for a lot of success. We have a lot of developers that come inbound. We have over a couple 100,000 today that develop on us, many that we don't know about, um. Recently, I was at a uh a meeting with a private equity group and one of their employees started mentioning Uh, they're building an investing app. They didn't actually know who Alpaca was, and, uh, I had a preview of the app. I'm like, Oh, how did you build this? What do you use? And this person said, Well, we use Alpaca. And I'm like, Oh, that's the company I work for. And, uh, and so it's really inspiring to see like how far that is spreading across the world.
Anastasia Kinski: Absolutely. And like what a sign of having made it, um, and speaking of across the world, obviously this era of digital finance is, is global and it's borderless, and you guys. Have activity going on everywhere and you've just announced today that you have an in principle agreement with ADGM and so congratulations.
Taroun Ajwani: Thank you.
Anastasia Kinski: Um, what have you seen? What are the barriers that, um, that kind of global approach, what, what, what, what barriers have you had to deal with and also what differences have you seen in the demand, um, in market, different markets?
Taroun Ajwani: Yeah, the, uh, I, I would first start by saying that when we look at a market, we think about, we go super deep, uh. Because we now have 8 licenses and what we're always thinking about is, uh, what is the local language, what is the culture like in that region, how do we like work with that culture, how do we respect the regulations, the regulators, and then how do we conform our technology to the local requirements and those 4 things are like in principle what we look at in every region and every region differs, but those are like the 4 fundamental things. And of those 4 things, at least in Abu Dhabi. Um, when we set out, we hired, we hired locally because we need to respect the language and culture. Although this do business in English, it's still helpful to know Arabic, so you need someone who's a dual speaker. Uh, then we went to learn, of course, the cultural nuances of spending time building that relationship, uh, with local regulators, with the ecosystems, with the banks, the institutions being embraced by them. And then we started to develop the exchange, uh, relationships on top of that layering on the regulation and, and through that we, we were able to construct a, a straw manual we need to get in there and we worked very closely with the local regulator to achieve this in principle approval and our local CEO, um, and we'll continue to do that around the world, but the Abu, uh, Abu Dhabi one is a very good opportunity, uh, again there's, uh, we get a lot of Uh, demand from, uh, established institutions there that are looking to re-platform for, to me, that's like the emerging theme. There, everyone is looking to re-platform, including in Saudi, including in Abu Dhabi, uh, including in Dubai and other parts of the world. And what that re-platforming means is getting off the legacy stacks onto newer API based infrastructure such as alpaca so we can add more product to, uh, for, for consumption for end consumers.
Anastasia Kinski: And answer this question as specifically or unspecifically as you like. Are there certain cultures or parts of the world that are more um that are quicker to adopt open and open data and, and that sort of collaboration than others?
Taroun Ajwani: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, uh, I think the Middle East is in that category for me.
Anastasia Kinski: Yeah, just like duck to water. This is exactly how we work and how we collaborate in the rest of our world, let alone our digital.
Taroun Ajwani: They're, they're very much the, their mantra very much is we're open for business and they embrace you and help you alongside. Uh, is really a trusted advisor. It's not, it's not like most countries when you meet with the regulator, it's somewhat intimidating and they'll just look you in the eye with a straight face and do you meet my checklist, whereas in, in the Middle East, they work alongside you.
Anastasia Kinski: It's fascinating to see how the social structures. That influence law, architecture, infrastructure also influence um digitalization, you know, it's, it's just a very interesting part. Um, but let's talk a little bit more about that replatforming. What do you think we're gonna look at in the next 12 months? What's going to be the main themes in that coming forward and, and how, how do you think we're going to see the maybe um legacy um institutions transform as a result?
Taroun Ajwani: Yeah, I, I would start by saying that uh. The headline numbers, there's over 80 trillion in global equities today, and that market is relatively untapped. Under that there's over 300 billion, sorry, over 300 trillion in, uh, assets custody globally, and all those assets are looking for a home somewhere. Uh, whether that's, uh, in Tradfi or crypto or wherever it may be, and so with that, like our focus is really one is to make sure that we, uh, we continue to build 100-year infrastructure here that can service not only the Robin Hoods of tomorrow that are emerging but also the established financial players in the market. So it's continue building a 100-year infrastructure. Continue to be the everything API investing. So beyond equities, crypto, being, being the platform that helps markets move on chain, we want to be in prediction markets. We want to be in futures, uh, we want to be in perps. Uh, so essentially any investable asset we want to consume and be able to deliver on our platform to all our customers.
Anastasia Kinski: Absolutely. Well, I think it's very exciting to see how alpaca is right at the center of so much of this transformation across the board and um congratulations and enjoy the rest of the summit.
Taroun Ajwani: Thank you for having us.
