Aries could be 'Unity for fintech'

8 points by joshdance 1 year ago | 6 comments

Just found this super interesting project called Aries Engine. They're pitching themselves as the Unity/Unreal of fintech, which caught my attention. The idea makes sense - before Unreal, game devs would burn cash just building physics engines before touching actual gameplay. Similarly, fintech startups often die dealing with:

Regulatory compliance Market data fees Infrastructure/broker-dealer setup They just got SEC and FINRA (FINRA stands for Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. It's a private, non-governmental organization that regulates the U.S. securities industry) approval and are launching an open development platform that supposedly handles a lot of this. They have built two reference apps they're open-sourcing:

An infinite canvas trading platform (widgets + TradingView/Discord integration) Mobile trading app Tech stack includes the usual suspects: commission-free trading APIs, options chain data, real-time feeds, etc. Team apparently built APIs for major brokerages before.

They have 16k+ MVP users. Planning futures/commodities and international. Crypto exchange in the works too (whitepaper available).

FINRA check: https://brokercheck.finra.org/firm/summary/330235

Anyone here tried building fintech products before? Curious how significant this could be. The FINRA approval seems legit, but interested in hearing takes from people who've dealt with these infrastructure problems firsthand.

Tweets talking about it.

https://x.com/Aries/status/1892281286301020671

https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1892280491111293355

Thoughts?

RedaFalih-Aries 1 year ago |

Hi, im the CEO at Aries. The Unity Parallel is a great one to draw, our goal is to be a complete fintech development engine.

Large banks and institutions can afford to pay past regulatory & infra barriers but in our time building APIs for brokerage like TradeStation and interviewing developers/entrepreneurs we found that not only does Fintech have one of the highest startup failure rates but most of those failures can boil down to regulation, data fees, and infra hurdles that fintech entrepreneurs need to jump over. We’re designed to do all of the leg work so that builders can focus on building and getting to market from day one.

To show off the power of our engine product we built two, soon to be open source, flagship products people can use to trade US equities and options. The first is Aries Infinite which is an infinite canvas product for trading and the second is a low latency mobile trading app for US capital markets. You can see them both at Aries.com

joshdance 1 year ago | |

Thanks for commenting, and congrats on the launch!

How did you come up with the idea for Aries?

destinyfulfill 1 year ago | | |

Funny enough we launched one of the first free options data tools for self directed investors in 2020. After many cease and desist letters from exchanges and price reporting authorities we grew into a company which worked with many of the top brokers in the USA.

In 2021 we set out to build an international Robinhood but we didn't have the $3m we needed to get through licensing and more importantly we had zero clue if there was any demand.

So we decided to work with TradeStation on their API and in return we could use it to MVP our idea.

That MVP grew to 16,000 customers and processed hundreds of thousands of trades monthly.

But TradeStation wasn’t totally happy. Their customers started logging in to TradeAries with their TS login and getting commission-free trading on our app. It was eating on their commissions paying revenue base which meant it was time to move out of our parent’s house.

We needed our own broker dealer license. So we went to our customers and asked them to invest in us. And they responded, we raised more than $1m via crowdfund on start engine.

So we started working to get our licenses and building software.

But we quickly came to a Y in the road.

We could either build really cool cutting-edge brokerage software OR we could build really cool cutting-edge brokerage software AND totally open source the whole project.

We thought about all the developers in our space and the hurdles we all face. We thought of all of the (80+) developers that we helped onboard to the TradeStation API.

Many fintech ideas die spending millions on market data, licensing, and infra before they ever get to launch. If we could solve that with Engine it would be cooler than just building another brokerage, so we ended up here.

jqpabc123 1 year ago |

Looks like what used to be called a "stock broker" to me.

Maybe I'm behind the times but this not exactly what I think of as "fintech".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fintech

RedaFalih-Aries 1 year ago | |

Hi. The brokerage aspect is one part of it. But there is a complete framework for building fintech. Its all on aries.com/engine

jqpabc123 1 year ago | | |

Ok,can you process FedNow transactions?

Cost?