Traders Magazine spoke with Andy Volz, Chief Operating Officer at Clear Street, which won Best Company at the 2023 Markets Choice Awards.
Please tell us about Clear Street and your capabilities.
Clear Street is a tech-enabled independent prime broker building financial infrastructure for today’s institutions. We started from scratch by building a completely cloud-native clearing and custody system designed for today’s complex, global market. Our proprietary technology platform adds significant efficiency to the market, while focusing on minimizing risk and cost for clients.
Today we offer emerging managers and institutions everything they need to clear, custody, and finance U.S. equities and options. Clients are onboarded in days instead of months, and access accurate and up-to-date data.
Clients of all sizes use our clearing, custody, execution, and prime brokerage platform to operate their businesses. Our prime clearing platform processes 2.5% of the gross notional U.S. equities volume.
What is most important to your organization—mission, vision or values?
At Clear Street, our mission to build financial infrastructure for today’s institutions drives our vision and values.
The financial industry still relies on outdated technology developed in the 1970s. Fifty-year-old COBOL mainframes are still in use today , creating a number of complex problems. Over time, firms built new technology on top of antiquated technology. This process is not only frustrating and inefficient—it kills profit margins and can increase risk. This is where Clear Street comes in. Our proprietary prime brokerage platform adds significant efficiency to the market, while focusing on minimizing risk and cost for clients.
In order for us to deliver on our promise, we must understand the magnitude of our responsibility to the capital markets, the backbone of the global economy. It is with this world view that we are driven to rebuild the entire process from scratch, united as a team.
Our values are more than just words on paper. They are guiding principles that see us through challenges, opportunities, successes, and failures, as we work towards achieving our goals every day.
What are your company’s long-term objectives and ambitions?
Today our platform supports U.S. equities and options. Our mission is to build a modern, single source-of-truth platform capable of handling every asset class, in every country, and in any currency.
How do you compete with some of the largest players in the market? What are your advantages?
Our tech stack utilizes modern cloud-native infrastructure, including resilient service orchestration, event-driven real-time processing, and scalable data warehousing, which is a sharp contrast to the batch processing offered by mainframes that run many back-office systems. Clear Street’s entire suite of software systems is built upon this consistent and cohesive technology stack, enabling the components to communicate seamlessly.
API is at our core and will continue expanding. We’re building for multi-asset clearing, with flexible, service-oriented architecture compatible with modern workflows.
What are recent accomplishments for Clear Street?
In April 2023, Clear Street announced a $270 million investment from Prysm Capital, the second tranche of a $435 million Series B funding, which values the Company at $2.0 billion. Over the past year, the number of institutional clients on our platform increased by 500%, our daily transactional volume increased by more than 300%, and our financing balances increased by nearly 150%.
What can we expect from Clear Street in the nearest future?
With support from the Series B funding, Clear Street plans to expand its reach across three dimensions:
● Asset classes: Over the next 12 months, we plan to expand our asset class offering into fixed income, Delta 1 and other Derivatives.
● Geographies: We are broadening our reach overseas in the UK and opened a registered broker-dealer in Canada to bolster our presence in North America.
● Customer personas: Growing our product offering to support the clearing needs of Market Makers, a major growth area for Clear Street.
