S10 E4: Open Banking Infra: Replacing Insecure Credential-Sharing with Safe Open Brokerage APIs for Millions of Retail Accounts with Brendan Wood, Co-Founder & CEO of SnapTrade
episodePreviously titled “S10 E4: Brendan Wood, SnapTrade” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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We went into it thinking, oh my goodness, this is gonna be a huge lift for us. We're gonna have to build 100 integrations very quickly. But talking to customers, we realized, oh, it turns out that coverage isn't the single most important thing. It's more important to have reliability and feature depth first. If you don't have the ability to do an on-demand account sync, that's not very useful for most of the applications who are interested in our API. If you don't have the ability to place orders, that's another thing that's a deal breaker. It's like, why would you even integrate with a trading API if it doesn't trade, right? We realized pretty quickly that we don't need to support every broker in the world. We can pick a few of the big ones in the US market and a few other markets that are important to us and just do a really good job at those. My name is Brendan Wood, and I'm the co-founder and CEO at SnapTrade.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries, who share what it takes to change an industry, who build the teams that have their back, keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve. Took off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on CodeStory. I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Brendan Wood focused in on the pain of broker integrations. and built the platform to connect them all. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy.
Grow your API user adoption and improve engineering velocity with friction-free integration experiences. With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in minutes. Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory and generate your first SDK for free. This message is sponsored by QA Wolf. QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Grotta, and Autotrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com. In August of 2021, we interviewed Brendan Wood on the podcast to tell the creation story of Passive. After the recording, the company decided to pivot into a new market, focusing on solving their biggest pain point for other platforms. They were running into the problems surrounding integrations into brokers. In fact, they were spending 80% of engineering time on integrations.
People started to reach out to his team to ask if they could use the integrations. And they started ideating about making this its own product. This is the creation story of Snap Trade.
SnapTrade is a unified trading API. If you're familiar with a service like Plaid, we think of ourselves like Plaid, but for trading specifically. So from like a user's perspective, you might not even be aware you're using SnapTrade for the most part. It's not like a direct consumer facing brand. But essentially what we do is we make it easy for you to connect your stock trading account into third party applications that you use to help you make decisions about the market or analyze your portfolio or do tax planning or whatever it is you need to do. Investors are relying more and more on third-party tools. They're not necessarily making all of their trading decisions at their stockbroker.
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