Waters Rankings 2020: Best Clearing House—Apex Clearing

Apex Clearing has claimed the best clearing house award at this year’s Waters Rankings. While Apex famously helped Robinhood launch, tapping Apex’s infrastructure to clear trades, the company has made inroads with both innovative startups, and registered investment advisers (RIAs), broker-dealers, and digital advisors. In total, the company has about 200 custodial clients.

The cloud-based platform fights against closed platforms, which Dustin Kirkland, Apex’s chief product officer, says, “attempt to own the end customer and control the intermediary. They dictate versus facilitate, with legacy systems built on legacy technology driven by legacy thinking.” Apex’s open API system allows it to work with a multitude of tech companies and end users.

Additionally, the company offers a full-stack business solution that connects the front-, middle-, and back-office environments through its Apex Extend offering. The offering makes its wealth-tech solutions available to a wider customer base, including brokerages, RIAs, asset managers, credit unions, community banks, fledgling start-ups, and non-financial firms looking to offer investment capabilities to their client base. Its solutions cover options, futures, digital securities, and cryptocurrencies; fully paid stock lending; margin and portfolio margin loans; and turnkey robo-advisor and financial planning modules.

Earlier this year, Apex announced the ability to open multiple accounts at once via the Accounts API as part of the launch of the Apex 20a Platform, the first implementation of its newly established product development launch cycles.

“Improvements and expansions to this capability will continue to be included in future cycles as part of our commitment to ongoing development of our technology,” Kirkland says. “This enables us to nimbly establish new operational frameworks for clients, providing greater transparency across technology changes, as well as a more consistent, reliable, and predictable schedule for backend updates.”

In June 2020, Apex Clearing also launched Apex Extend, a new turnkey platform with highly configurable front- and middle-office functions that enables any provider to quickly create, launch and run an investing app or advisory platform using Apex’s back-office capabilities.