chicago-fintech
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John O'Reilly and the Quiet Mathematics of Growth
From Irishjobs.com to OppFi's public listing and NinjaTrader's $1.5 billion combination with Kraken, O'Reilly has kept returning to the same question: can growth be measured, diversified and made useful to the customer?
Barchart Put Futures on the Web. Then Its Readers Asked to Borrow the Plumbing
A 1995 subscription site became a data supplier when customers asked to put its quotes on their own pages. Thirty years later, Barchart serves both the person checking a soybean chart and the grain elevator managing the hedge behind it.
Colleen Sheeren Spent 11 Years Learning Every Piece of Barchart. Now She Has to Explain the Whole Thing.
The Chicago executive rose from marketing associate to CMO inside one complicated data company. Her current challenge is elegantly simple: make its many businesses feel like one story.
NinjaTrader Built a Futures Machine. Kraken Paid $1.5 Billion for the Plumbing.
A free charting tool became a broker, a clearing stack and, eventually, the bridge Kraken wanted between crypto and regulated futures. The clever part was not the candlesticks. It was owning more of what happened after a trader clicked buy.
Daniel Lev Is Building the Payment Company His First Startup Needed
A fantasy-sports checkout problem sent Daniel Lev down a payments rabbit hole. The result is Coinflow, a Chicago company trying to make a merchant's money move as quickly as a customer's click.
M1
M1 is a Chicago-based personal finance platform that bundles investing, borrowing, and spending into a single app it calls 'The Finance Super App.' Built around customizable 'Pies' that let people design a portfolio of stocks and ETFs and automate contributions and rebalancing, M1 aims to give self-directed investors the kind of automated, low-cost money management once reserved for the wealthy. Founded in 2016 by Brian Barnes, the company has raised more than $300 million and surpassed $10 billion in assets under management.
Edward Woodford
Edward Woodford is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Hash, the Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company that quietly powers digital-asset features inside Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Shift4. A Goldman Sachs commodities alum who bought his first Bitcoin from an ATM as an MIT grad student, he built and sold a regulated derivatives venue before turning Zero Hash into a billion-dollar 'plumbing' business that has settled more than $45 billion in volume and onboarded over five million people to crypto.