Top Start-ups That Have Changed the Landscape of Financial Markets Once and for All

The world of fintech has been one of the most exciting areas of investment over the past decade and many startups have addressed some of the key banking and digital payment challenges faced by the global market.

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However, certain startups have been more focused on a particular issue, which is the financial market itself - how it operates and how retail and institutional investors interact with it.

Revolutionizing an ecosystem as old as some of the financial markets of the world is not an easy task and requires thorough analysis of the issues faced by market makers and participants alike. Below we can look at 5 startups that have significantly altered the landscape of financial markets globally.

Robinhood

Founded in 2013, Robinhood has emerged as one of the most popular commission-free brokerage firms serving the North American market.

As the nature of financial markets dictate, Robinhood’s growth story has not been linear up to this point and the Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the popularization of the platform, due to lockdown measures across the U.S and Canada..

However, nowadays the Robinhood platform offers more than just stock brokerage services and comes with useful features, such as:

While Robinhood is not internationally available, the platform has had an outsized effect on the performance of the stock market, particularly during the GameStop short squeeze.

Coinbase

Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2012 and has since become the third-largest exchange on the market, only behind Binance and Bybit. Coinbase is particularly popular in the North American market and is listed on the Nasdaq, under the COIN ticker.

Coinbase offers crypto trading and digital asset management services to both individual clients and businesses, as well as its development platform and onramp services to third-party crypto companies.

The platform is currently home to over 17,500 assets and the list keeps growing every year.

In an increasingly competitive cryptocurrency market, Coinbase stands as one of the most successful companies in the world, facilitating trading in countries all over the world.

Acorns

Acorns is a fintech savings and investment platform that was launched in 2012 and allows its clients to shop using the Acorns credit card, which rounds up the spare change on the account and auto-invests it in stocks.

This allows users to gradually build up their savings as they shop at retail locations or online, without the hassle of actively managing an investment portfolio and hand-picking which stocks and bonds to invest in.

The platform allows for savings, retirement investments like the 401(k), investing for kids and banking services, as well as Acorns Earn, which provides clients with bonus investments for shopping at any of the hundreds of retail locations that are partnered with Acorns.

Acorns has paved the way for a novel approach to savings investments, allowing users to passively accumulate funds that grow alongside the U.S. stock market.

Binance

Launched in 2017, Binance is now the single largest crypto exchange in the world and the largest player in the global crypto ecosystem.

The platform offered trading, custodial, asset management, savings and other services to millions of clients all over the world.

The Binance native BNB and BUSD coins are widely used by the clients of the exchange and the Binance Card service, which was discontinued by the end of 2023, was available in over 30 countries worldwide.

The sheer influence of Binance on the global crypto market is difficult to measure. The platform boasts a daily trading volume of $50 billion on average, which places it firmly on the top spot among globally available crypto exchanges.

Public

Public is a brokerage firm and trading platform that offers individual, institutional and copy trading to clients based in North America.

While copy trading has been around before the startup came to be, Public has become the most popular mainstream platform that offers this service, where traders can choose between stocks, ETFs, bonds, options and cryptocurrencies for trading.

Public also offers an AI assistant - Alpha, which offers automated trade insights and asset analysis for Public clients.

The Public Premium account, which costs $8/month (free with $50,000 or more in account balance), offers advanced technical features and VIP account management to clients, as well as company KPIs, Bullish and bearish sentiment analysis, analyst rating history, and more.

Live earnings calls and transcripts are also readily available to Public Premium clients.

Where Public stands out from the competition are the number of auxiliary services available to Premium customers, only for $8/month.