A whole share is a curious admission ticket. It tells the customer that the price of entry depends on the company’s share price, however much money the customer actually has. Robert Cortright spent years working on a different arrangement. At DriveWealth, the business he founded in 2012, a person’s investment could be measured in dollars and translated into a fraction of a share. The decimal point had been given a useful job.
Cortright, often called Bob, arrived at that proposition after a long career in financial markets. He had already helped build a retail currency business and a trading company that Bank of America acquired. He understood something less photogenic than an investing app: the machinery needed to make a transaction happen. His story follows that machinery from foreign exchange to stocks, and eventually into products carrying other companies’ names.
A market career before the app
His academic route began with biochemistry at Lehigh University, followed by an MBA in international finance. Chemistry and capital markets make an unusual pair on a résumé. Both degrees belong to the same career, however, and the finance qualification became the more obvious professional signpost. His public education record also includes Lehigh’s baseball team. Before the brokerage infrastructure, there was a rather different field.
His early working years took him into foreign exchange at N. M. Rothschild. Later positions included Credit Suisse, First Chicago Advisory Group and Merrill Lynch. By the time he became an entrepreneur, he had spent years around trading, risk and the movement of capital. A new business would have to survive actual markets, with their inconvenient habit of behaving independently of the presentation.
In 2001, he co-founded FX Solutions, serving as co-chief executive until May 2009. It appeared on the Inc. 500 list for three consecutive years. In 2007, Francisco Partners invested $156 million at a $255 million enterprise valuation. Another venture he co-founded, Financial Labs, was acquired by Bank of America in 2006 at an enterprise value of $43 million. These were separate businesses, and separate lessons in building financial systems.
He also co-founded TAB Networks, where he was co-CEO from October 2009 to July 2012, and worked as a partner at Tachyon Capital Management. DriveWealth emerged from a career already populated with operating responsibilities. The founder had considerable experience before he had this particular founding idea.
A whole share was an awkward admission ticket
DriveWealth’s premise joined two problems: the cost of buying a whole share and the difficulty of reaching US securities from elsewhere. A person might know an American company’s products perfectly well while finding ownership of its stock awkward or expensive. Cortright wanted the distance between those two relationships to become shorter.
He founded DriveWealth in 2012. The early business included a mobile investing platform, and access was only part of its stated purpose. In 2015, financial education author Neale Godfrey joined its board. The company coupled its brokerage offering with investor education and set out to help younger people gain the confidence to participate. The trading charge advertised then was $2.99 per trade. The original proposition had a price tag, as well as an educational ambition.
“DriveWealth’s mission is to create a generation of passionate and informed investors,” Cortright said at the time. The useful word is informed. Opening an account and understanding an investment are different accomplishments. Putting both into the early mission made the ambition more demanding than simply supplying another place to press a buy button.
By 2015, the company was also developing its institutional relationships. Harry Temkin joined as chief information officer after senior roles at Thomson Reuters and Bridge Information Services. Cortright pointed to Temkin’s platform-building experience as valuable for serving international partners and their clients. The operating question was becoming how to give other businesses the tools to deliver an investing experience.
The business behind somebody else’s app
The interesting turn in Cortright’s story is the company’s willingness to work behind another company’s interface. DriveWealth had its own retail app. By October 2019, its partnerships team was describing plans to retire that operation and concentrate on infrastructure for other businesses. An app can make a company visible. Infrastructure can make it useful in places where customers scarcely notice its name.
That infrastructure encompassed customer checks, money movement, trading technology and access to US markets. Partners could take the capabilities they needed rather than reproduce an entire brokerage operation themselves. DriveWealth’s relationship with Revolut supplied a concrete example of the model: the customer-facing business could offer stock trading while using another company’s brokerage technology underneath.
For Cortright, the international character of the business had already become a daily routine. In a 2017 account of his schedule, he described checking email between five and seven in the morning. Overseas partners were finishing their days; traveling colleagues also needed attention. The early start had a practical purpose. Geography had booked the meeting before anyone reached the office.
There is something pleasingly ordinary about that detail. Global finance acquires a grand vocabulary, but its working day still contains an unanswered message and a colleague in another time zone. Cortright’s account makes the company’s reach tangible. Serving customers internationally means arranging the small handovers through which a larger system continues to operate.
“I started DriveWealth with the goal of increasing access to U.S. markets and modernizing the way the world invests”
Robert Cortright, 2020
A very small trade, a rather large funding round
In September 2020, a MetaTrader 5 connection offered another route into that infrastructure. Brokers using the trading platform could connect to DriveWealth for US equities, including fractional shares. The examples were wonderfully unromantic: half an Apple share, or 1.2345 Amazon shares. Precision was doing the work that a slogan could only announce.
The connection also showed how Cortright’s original foreign-exchange world and his equity business could meet. A broker already using an established trading platform could add access through a server-to-server connection. DriveWealth’s technology did not require every customer to begin with a new app. It could sit inside arrangements that already existed.
Then came a financing on a different scale. In August 2021, DriveWealth raised $450 million in a Series D led by Insight Partners and Accel, valuing the company at $2.85 billion. The announced uses included expanding products and services, hiring, technology investment, self-clearing and acquisitions. The infrastructure idea had acquired a substantial budget.
A dated financing milestone for DriveWealth.
Cortright’s plan was to support investing inside digital wallets and brokerage apps around the world. A person could begin with as little as a dollar through participating experiences. The contrast in scale explains much of the business: very small customer transactions depend on a considerable investment in the systems behind them. Convenience has an expensive backstage.
The retail trading excitement of 2021 also exposed the responsibilities attached to easier access. During the GameStop episode, Cortright welcomed broader participation while raising concerns about education around sophisticated products such as options. He also described pressure on market systems during intense trading. The point was practical: when participation grows, the machinery and the understanding of its users have to keep up.
The chairman’s chair had a return ticket
His move from founder-CEO to executive chairman came in May 2022, when Terry Angelos, formerly Visa’s global head of fintech and crypto, became global CEO. The company was expanding its leadership team alongside its international business. Cortright’s new title marked a change in the work expected of him.
The arrangement changed again within months. Angelos announced his departure in January 2023, and Cortright returned as global CEO. Later that year, former New York Stock Exchange chief operating officer Michael Blaugrund took the CEO role, with Cortright continuing as executive chairman. The dates matter. A career can look beautifully orderly once someone has removed all the occasions on which it changed direction.
In August 2025, Naureen Hassan succeeded Blaugrund, who was returning to NYSE parent ICE. Hassan had been president of UBS Americas and had held senior positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab. Cortright welcomed her appointment and credited Blaugrund’s period with growth, expansion and profitability. He remained the founder and executive chairman.
Those handovers place him in a continuing relationship with the institution he started. The founder’s idea now passes through successive chief executives and teams with different professional backgrounds. That is part of the work of building a financial company intended to outlast any one person’s operating timetable.
Seventeen years between handshakes
In June 2026, Cortright received the EY US Entrepreneur Of The Year award for the New York region. His earlier regional recognition had come in New Jersey in 2009 for FX Solutions. Seventeen years separated the two awards. Between them lay the founding of DriveWealth, its shift toward serving other businesses, a substantial funding round and several changes in the CEO office.
The 2026 announcement described DriveWealth serving more than 100 institutions across over 30 countries. Those figures belong to that announcement, rather than to a timeless claim of scale. They do, however, give the original proposition a visible footprint. An idea about making ownership more accessible had become a business used by institutions internationally.
Cortright’s stated ambition remained close to the original problem: make investing more open, global and woven into ordinary life. The surrounding technology had grown more elaborate; the customer’s question stayed simple. Can the money I have buy a place in this market? His career has repeatedly returned to the work required to answer yes. A decimal point, properly employed, can open quite a door.