Interviewer: We are in Lisbon at the Alpaca Partners Summit and I am joined by Tony Lee, who is the Chief Brokerage Officer of Alpaca. Tony, thank you so much for joining us.
Tony Lee: Thanks for having me.
Interviewer: So I wanna jump straight in with Alpaca, how you have been the go to um er place for coders to build and um transform their apps. And now we're in an AI world and you have to think about the agents. As well, how have you adjusted what you're doing to accommodate for this?
Tony Lee: Yeah, it's a great question because, you know, um, thinking about the developer experience has always been very core to Alpaca and has really led to most of our success in all aspects of our business, um, and. You know, we saw usage of um agents and AI on our platform well before we even knew that this would be a huge boost to our business um and making that transition to an agentic world was um. A little bit unnatural for us to start because we were so hyper focused on what is the developer experience and then because rather than what's the human experience or what other brokerage firms are focused on and to shift to what is the gentic experience it it you need to put your mindset of what does an agent need, what does an agent want, how does, how does an agent best interact with the platform, um, and, uh, putting yourself in that mindset is, you know, a little difficult because you don't really know what's happening behind the scenes, but, um. You know, the way that we did it is we just started building and we challenged all of our employees to just start building their own agents and that's how we learned what the agentic experience should be.
Interviewer: And it's part of what makes alpaca just so successful um in this, but. As you say, you know, everything needs to, we need to consider the aging, we need to consider so many different parts of digitalization. Do you see, do you feel that everything being digitalized necessarily makes it better?
Tony Lee: Um, it doesn't necessarily make it better, but it definitely makes it more efficient, um, and it allows, um, more people to do more things, right? You know, so if you take an individual who never thought about creating a, um, a diversified portfolio across 100 names because, you know, who has time to track 100 different investments actively and you balance them. Now they have the powers at their fingertips to actually execute that. So it really empowers people to adopt new investment strategies and ones that they would have never thought that they could actually execute before.
Interviewer: It's like giving that access to So many more Lego blocks that you can start creating with and you can start imagining different ideas. um, and as you say, you know, it's not just for coders now actually, this is across the board. Um, and that access point is so important then for what you're seeing your your customers doing your end users. What are the best use cases you've seen lately if you can, uh, keep them to one or two?
Tony Lee: Oh, there's so many, but, um, you know, I, I spoke to one user, um. And um they actually created. Almost like an investment committee. This person came from a traditional hedge fund background, um, and that has like an investment committee that um that uh debates all their investments. So this individual created like 5 or 6 agents, all programmed to look at investing in different ways, and they, the agents would debate with each other on what to invest in, right? Uh, I, um, and then this person would end up being the final decision maker, so they would, the committee would make an investment thesis, present it, and they would say yes or no, right?
Interviewer: Amazing, yeah, yeah, that's fabulous, and as you say, like doesn't happen if you don't have all of these options at your fingertips and for, for building, and so it's that kind of innovation that, that, you know, alpaca becomes the absolute foundation for, um. But as you say, lots of agents involved, still the human is the one making the final decision. Um, what does, you know, keeping humans in control mean for alpaca as a business?
Tony Lee: Um, yeah, so at the end of the day, you know. Financial services capital markets is built on trust, right? um and you know if individuals want to use our platform to be um their brokerage of choice for their agents they have to be able to trust that you know that we're in control they're in control as well and so the way we do that um is primarily through. Um, server side, which is something that we control, risk, risk checks, so we allow the users to be able to say I only want to be able to execute 10 number of trades in 10 window of time or I don't want to execute a trade that's above a certain size, right? And, um, and these are all things that we're going to continue to iterate on and build more controls in. Um, but then at the same time we don't want to limit the use cases, so we, you know, we do want to give that control to the user to say, do I want that control or not?
Interviewer: Well, thank you so much, Tony, for joining us. That was absolutely fabulous, and I really hope the rest of the summit is, is a success.
Tony Lee: Thank you very much.
