The barn had already had one improbable career. Before Dan Schleifer and Terry Thorsen started building financial software there in 2012, the Charlottesville building had been renovated by the Dave Matthews Band as a recording studio. Then came ChartIQ. Somewhere between the musicians and the market charts, the premises acquired a rather different relationship with volume.
It is an appealing origin for a business that would eventually become part of S&P Global. It also places Schleifer a useful distance from the usual scenery of financial technology. His company began in Virginia, away from the familiar New York and London addresses. The early questions were practical ones: finding people, winning customers and surviving the time a financial institution takes to decide it wants something.
Fourteen years later, the scenery has changed again. Schleifer has stepped away from daily operations at interop.io, the company formed when his Finsemble business merged with Glue42. He remains involved as a board member and shareholder. Royal Park Partners now lists him as a managing director leading its US operations from New York. The founder who sold software is helping founders think through selling businesses.
A chart that could leave the desk
ChartIQ started with a conspicuous mismatch. People could use a phone to arrange travel or deposit a check, yet serious trading tools remained attached to the desktop. Schleifer and his co-founders saw an opening for charting software that travelled across devices without shedding its useful capabilities along the way.
By 2014, he was explaining a product that worked across PCs, Macs, tablets and phones. ChartIQ licensed its technology to brokerages and trading-platform developers and also offered tools to individual traders. The ambition was concrete: make professional charting available to people whose budgets and hardware did not resemble those of a large financial institution.
In an interview that December, Schleifer described the early business as largely supported by its own revenue. There had been early seed money from Howard Lindzon, the StockTwits co-founder, and outside capital had recently followed. Customers, rather than a succession of fundraising announcements, had supplied much of the initial fuel.
The product could be described in engineering terms. Schleifer often described it through an ordinary action. With the Tradier brokerage integration, someone on a train could adjust a stop-loss order by touching and dragging it on a phone’s chart. That example is now a little time capsule: a reminder of when doing a familiar financial task on a small screen still required an explanation.
There was a social circuit around the technology, too. Schleifer called Lindzon’s Stocktoberfest a favourite finance conference, a place where individual traders, software businesses and established financial platforms mixed. His product sat among those constituencies. He had to explain the same chart to people buying it, people embedding it and people hoping it would help them make a decision.
HTML5, with a side of anchovies
One early encounter catches the comedy of that translation. At Lindzonpalooza in 2013, market technician JC Parets joked about Schleifer’s use of HTML5, treating it as though the advance from HTML4 were self-explanatory. Parets later recounted Schleifer pointing out that he was the person in the room who did not know the difference. The exchange survived because Parets was happy to tell it on himself.
Schleifer’s own startup biography offered a different kind of specification: anchovies, country ham and laksa. His X profile calls him a food enthusiast. For someone whose working vocabulary includes interoperability, the food list is unusually helpful. It supplies three things a reader can picture immediately, none requiring a systems diagram.
His earlier employment included SAVO Group, Trustwave and SecurePipe. Product and corporate marketing were part of his background before ChartIQ. That history matters to the way he discusses software: the recurring question is what someone can do with it. A chart must fit into a person’s work. Eventually, that question grew beyond the chart itself.
The trouble between the windows
Finsemble launched in 2017. Its subject was the untidy collection of applications on a financial professional’s desktop. Banks had accumulated software across departments and generations of technology. A newer web application might sit beside an older native program and an internally built tool, each useful, each requiring a separate visit.
Schleifer described two costs. Users spent time moving information manually, copying, pasting and typing the same details again. Developers spent time rebuilding functionality and maintaining connections. The work looked busy from either side of the screen. Much of that busyness existed because the applications had never learned to cooperate.
“Now with Finsemble technology, firms can connect applications intelligently on the desktop.”
Dan Schleifer, 2019
Finsemble aimed to let those applications share data and context. A chart, an order ticket and a trading blotter could participate in a connected workflow. The appeal depended on the usefulness of what a firm already owned. Throwing every application away would have been an expensive way to improve relations between them.
Choose once. Let connected applications carry the context forward.
Open standards became part of that argument. ChartIQ joined the foundation that became FINOS in 2017, alongside businesses including Tick42. By 2024, interop.io had upgraded to FINOS Gold membership and was investing in FDC3 working groups. The standard supplies a common language for applications. Commercial rivals could have a reason to help develop that language together.
In his writing about the smart desktop, Schleifer resisted the idea that new technology needed to eliminate established platforms. His preferred arrangement allowed existing systems to become more useful through connections. There is a certain restraint in that ambition. Software vendors enjoy imagining that everything should revolve around their software. He was arguing for room on a crowded desk.
When the competitor becomes the colleague
The same logic eventually reached the companies. Finsemble and Glue42 had competed for financial institutions pursuing desktop interoperability. Schleifer and Glue42’s Leslie Spiro were personally friendly. By June 2023, their businesses had become interop.io, with Spiro as chief executive and Schleifer as president.
The talks had begun about nine months earlier, with technology due diligence starting in late 2022. Schleifer’s explanation was disarmingly economical: both firms were spending money building similar technology to take customers toward a similar destination. Combining them would allow more of that effort to serve clients.
A merger still required the less photogenic work of checking that the technology, culture and intentions would fit. The combined company also brought together professional services expertise. At announcement, it reported more than 170 employees, including 110 in research, development and implementation. Connecting software at an institution involves people who can understand the institution as well as the software.
ChartIQ’s sale to S&P Global closes.
Finsemble and Glue42 combine as interop.io.
That merger followed the sale of ChartIQ to S&P Global. The charting transaction was signed on December 23, 2022, closed on January 1, 2023, and announced four days later. ChartIQ would support products including Capital IQ Pro while remaining available to license separately. Finsemble continued on its own path before the combination with Glue42.
A prototype beats a promise
By 2024, Schleifer was discussing the practicalities with Dan Green of T. Rowe Price. Their conference conversation explored a trading workstation called Agora and the mixture of internally built components and bought technology behind it. Green distinguished the years spent shaping the idea from the much shorter period of building and connecting it.
Schleifer’s advice was to show people something recognisable. A prototype could be working code or even a PowerPoint wireframe. Put the applications they already use in front of them, then demonstrate what happens when those applications cooperate. An abstract integration strategy becomes easier to discuss when someone can see their own working day inside it.
He also endorsed incremental delivery: make a small change, show its value and keep going. The point extended to the relationship between technology teams and the business. Repeatedly delivering useful improvements could rebuild confidence. His discussion of interoperability kept returning to a thoroughly human difficulty: persuading someone that the promised improvement will actually arrive.
The founder changes seats
A colleague’s memory offers a more personal version of that confidence. When Schleifer announced his departure from daily operations, James Bunting recalled meeting him at a Charlottesville coffee shop roughly a decade earlier. Schleifer arrived in a battered Saab and took a hiring chance on him before the role was fully settled. Bunting credited that decision with opening a career that took him across regions and into product leadership.
Schleifer had spent 27 years in B2B software when he announced the change. In February 2026, his departure as president became public, with his board involvement continuing. Soon came the announcement of his arrival at Royal Park Partners, initially as a senior advisor. “Welp... it turns out I’m an Investment Banker now,” he wrote.
The connection was already there. When selling ChartIQ, he had asked Royal Park’s Aman Behzad to run the process. They stayed in touch through the Finsemble spinout, another funding round and the Glue42 merger. Joining the advisory firm meant bringing experience of those decisions to other CEOs and founding teams.
His July 2026 writing shows where his attention has gone. He examined how usage-based and outcome-based pricing complicate annual recurring revenue, a metric he had relied on while running ChartIQ and Finsemble. He argued for distinguishing contracted revenue from variable consumption and payments for delivered outcomes. The numbers needed to explain the business accurately.
That is a fitting next problem for a founder who began by helping people see financial information. First came the chart on the screen. Then came the connections around it. Now he is helping founders explain what their companies have built and how those businesses earn their money. The barn’s former tenant has changed jobs again. There is still quite a lot of explaining to do.