How FinTech Startups Return To Their Roots With Developer Programs

Before Rachel Carpenter co-founded FinTech startup Intrinio, she faced a challenge when it came to building an app for the finance industry: She couldn’t afford the data needed to run the program. That is, she needed to pull stock prices and all sorts of information into her offering, but she found that the data came at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

After attending college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she shelved the idea and tackled the data problem by founding Intrinio with Co-founder Joey French. The company offers more than 300 different types of data to developers, allowing them to incorporate the information into their apps. Now, true to their roots, FinTech startups like Intrinio have developer programs that offer their data to early-stage startups for free for a six-month period.

In a PYMNTS interview, Carpenter said the program has “blossomed and organically grown [into] this whole community full of developers that are building tools [for the] financial industry.” The company now has more than 250 startups creating products such as mobile apps, websites, algorithms, dashboards and stock bots. The focus of the program is early-stage companies that are writing their first lines of code.

To be eligible for the program, companies have to meet two requirements. First, they can’t take in more than $10,000 a month in revenue. Secondly, they can’t have raised more than $200,000 in capital. To apply for the program, companies fill out a form and, according to Carpenter, they can get up and running in 30 seconds once they are approved.

And they don’t have to go it alone. Intrinio’s website has documentation that shows developers how to query different data points. In addition, the company features a tool that could build the code needed to show a particular piece of data, such as revenues from a certain quarter – not a traditionally easy task.

The company also has chat support available to developers for the problems they might encounter when building innovative products. And Carpenter’s team has personal experience, as 75 percent of them are programmers. “They’re excited, and they enjoy helping,” she added.

Beyond the support, the company recently sponsored an algorithmic trading competition with a hedge fund. According to Carpenter, it showed that when one makes data accessible to data scientists, they can build cool things.