Anastasia Kinsky: We are here at the Alpaca Partner Summit, and I have the pleasure of being joined by Jack Keating, who is CEO of Webull Tech US. Jack, thank you so much for joining us.
Jack Keating: Hi. Great to be here.
Anastasia Kinsky: So you’ve built one of the leading trading platforms over in the US. I know that, from a retail perspective, you guys have demand across so many different products. What are you seeing the greatest demand for at the moment from your customers?
Jack Keating: Sure. So Webull is a US-based broker. We have 14 markets that we’re operating in, with brokers internationally accessing customers in 35 countries. In the US, we’ve seen growth in a few different asset classes really across the board over the last year. The newcomers are event contracts for sure. Prediction markets has been a big product for us, launching in partnership with Kalshi. Now we’re looking at bringing other markets on, and we’re also seeing perps. But with prediction markets, we’ve seen kind of that explosive growth over the last six, 12 months. So very exciting. Lots of customer demand. It’s bringing retail customers kind of from the full spectrum. We have customers who have been dormant for a few years, who maybe were interested in crypto and then stepped away. They’re coming back. We have a whole new class of clients entering. So it’s an exciting time to be an investing platform.
Anastasia Kinsky: Absolutely. And see that excitement come back as well. And what about the demand for AI and any kind of agentic systems in how customers are trading?
Jack Keating: Sure. So Webull has launched the chatbot customer service agent. We very quickly saw user adoption there. Not only are you getting 24/7 service, almost over 70% of our inbound inquiries are getting solved by an agent right on the trading side. Once the customer service solution was in place, we moved toward more complex and more interactive capabilities. So can the agent, [unclear: “Vega”] is what we call it, can it answer your questions about what the market’s doing today, what a stock’s doing today? Right now we’re going off platform as well. So we’re historically known for our UI, its charting, the tooling within the platform, to distinguish itself from our competition. Now we’ve enabled our MCP connections into ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, right? There’s an open API that you can connect your own tools to. So investors have a lot more options there. It’s a whole new frontier for us, for them to interact with their account. And then the skills are being added continuously. So we’ve seen growth, I would say modest growth so far. I mean, it’s in the tens of thousands of customers that are trading with an agent connection. I think over the next year we’re going to see that really take off as more tools come.
Anastasia Kinsky: And it’s fascinating to see you guys adapt from, as you say, that UI app focus through into, okay, how can we provide that holistic approach to people’s finances? It’s very interesting. And talk to me a little bit about the international expansion, though, because as you say, you’re in so many different jurisdictions now. You provide services to customers all over the world. What is driving that adoption, and how do the products differ?
Jack Keating: Sure. You know, that’s a great question. We’ve seen over the last nine years, you know, success in the US, the B2C model, and now launching into a series of other countries, APAC, Europe, LatAm. It’s been educational in some ways that each market is not the same. It is not a copy-paste of what we offer in the US. The demand from a different market is unique. Maybe they aren’t interested in options, or they can’t trade options, or they can’t trade margin, which are some of our core US products. We need to kind of think differently on the asset class. And then the US is in the midst of a regulatory unique period in our regulatory history. A lot of things that have been off limits are reentering, whether it’s single stock futures or, you know, different asset classes. Both SEC and CFTC are showing a lot more progressive and partnership approach. That’s not necessarily the same global trend. So we’ve seen other markets still are in a very conservative place. So kind of hiring seasoned regulatory compliance locally and seasoned CEO leadership locally has been helpful to kind of not make the missteps and enter into and create trouble right out of the gate.
Anastasia Kinsky: So [unclear: “bacon that”] sustainable, scalable product development.
Jack Keating: Exactly. Yeah.
Anastasia Kinsky: And speaking of that and the demand that you’re seeing, and this sort of idea that actually finance is transforming into this [unclear: “digital and gameplay”] where everything needs to plug into each other. And tokenization has also been in the headlines alongside prediction markets, event contracts, etc. And what have you seen in terms of that appetite, and maybe a little bit on the regulatory side, for what, you know, what kind of regulatory changes have been the big game changers for you?
Jack Keating: Sure, absolutely. I think tokenization is another buzzword we’re hearing a lot. There is kind of a vision for where we’ll be in five years, and I think the path to get there is not clear at all. For a lot of people, it may be becoming more clear, as the US SEC has kind of laid some foundation or framework for what stock trading, stock tokens can look like. Yeah, we’ll be at the table. We’ll be a part of that. I think for our clients in the US, the programmability of trading does create a demand for 24/7. Tokenization is a very nice fit for that requirement. The agentic trading as well, kind of round-the-clock risk monitoring. All of that fits very well with tokenization.
Anastasia Kinsky: So how do we get here?
Jack Keating: Exactly. I think with the [unclear: “TSV”] model, we’ll have some of the kind of legacy institutions hopefully adopting that, some of the startups as well. Many have been operating offshore with similar token exchange. Now they have at least a framework to bring that to the US.
Anastasia Kinsky: Yeah. Interesting. Also to see how fintechs, crypto and actually even financial institutions are sort of all merging together, and not merging, that’s the wrong word, but blending together in terms of who’s the first mover here. It’s no longer such a set piece of, like, okay, this is my space over here of the non-crypto world, here’s yours. Whether it’s in prediction markets or trading stocks or, you know, offering other payment solutions, there’s such a merging together of different worlds.
Jack Keating: Yes. Absolutely. So, similar to the theme of how the mobile app may not be as important, the asset class is the same kind of merging or blending. And I think with prediction markets, I kind of look at, like, crypto prediction markets is one of our fastest-growing products, right? Predicting what the price of Bitcoin will do. Investors are interested in holding those predictions versus holding the Bitcoin itself. So there could be prediction markets for all kinds of things, including related to securities. Does that become a new asset class that almost takes away from the traditional assets? So definitely some interesting times ahead with that. I don’t know that the regulatory appetite in the US especially will be open to the prediction markets growing endlessly forever. I mean, we’ve seen lots of lawsuits already. So interesting to follow.
Anastasia Kinsky: It’s an interesting space, as you say. You know, on the one hand, there’s the customer demand for trading things and for making money on the basis of what they have and the investments that they want to make. And on the other hand, you’ve got a completely different conversation with regulators, of institutions, of asking the question, what is this asset? And that is, of course, a very important question. But when it gets down to the app or using AI to trade, and to your point, I think what we may see is, with AI, the agents maybe making these choices of which market or which asset, which the customer has an objective or an intent. What is the right asset might not be up to the user. It might be the agent making those decisions. So where’s there the best price, the best efficiency, from that perspective? A whole new world of questions to answer. Thank you, Jack, so much for joining us, and I really hope you enjoy the rest of the summit.
Jack Keating: Pleasure to be here. We look forward to hearing more.
Anastasia Kinsky: All right. Thank you.
