This from the site feels reassuring: "Your funds are held in your name at Apex Clearing, one of the largest US Custodians holding over $114B in funds."
The "in your name" part is specifically what I was looking for.
Yeah, FWIW I think their disclosures look good, but I want some explicit reassurance. I want to ensure "in your name" is not the same thing as "for benefit of".
The thing that actually gives me the most reassurance is that they say definitively that they are a Registered Investment Advisor. In the Synapse situation, all the regulatory agencies were essentially saying "not my problem" because Synapse itself wasn't covered under any explicit regulatory regime. That doesn't seem to be the case here, but I'd feel better if the founders said something along the lines of "This is how we're different from Synapse..."
If you want to hold people's serious money and not play money, understand that priority #1 is not growth or expense ratios - it's risk mitigation. Swiss banks are notoriously expensive and have terrible investment products that hold trillions because of their obsession with protecting capital.
As a startup, you must figure out how to convince ordinary people to change their family safety net. Full transparency, audits by a known firm, and an entire brochure/mini-site explaining every significant fintech failure, showing how my money would remain safe if that scenario happened again.
> Swiss banks are notoriously expensive and have terrible investment products that hold trillions because of their obsession with protecting capital.
What? Their second largest bank, Credit Suisse, imploded only last year. They hold trillions because of their nominal neutrality (though their cooperation with western sanctions against Russians appears to be hurting this significantly) and banking secrecy laws that serve as shelter for proceeds for all sorts of crimes.
Typically, when referring to “Swiss banks” people in the industry refer to the likes of Pictet/Lombard/Baer. Credit Suisse was closer to Bank of America than a Swiss bank.
Nomenculture aside, depositors did not lose a single cent in that implosion, and it went smoother than the SVB one.
I lost thousands of dollars with Snyapse's collapse, and there's still no update on getting any money back. It is a real concern, and something many are pushing on to regulate + rule over, but so far there's no bite.
The "in your name" part is specifically what I was looking for.