I love the term TradFi.

I’ve seen it more and more over the last several months. It’s been around for 1-2 years, I would estimate.

But it’s really growing on me now.

Traditional Finance. That’s what it stands for. Legacy banks, old brokerages, cluttered clearing houses, and just people shuffling papers. Doing verification the old fashioned way.

I actually just bought a car and was pretty surprised how absurd the process still is. They need photos of a utility bill proving my address? Or need a picture of snail mail? I forgot that some banking processes are still operating like it’s 1987.

TradFi is a great term because it buckets such a legacy industry into one phrase. It’s a reminder how outdated the industry is as phrases like this usually mark the start of a downfall. The more popular a term like this gets, the better it is for all of us. It’s definitely time that we move onward. Banking as we know it needs an enormous upgrade.

Who wants to work in TradFi? Sounds super boring and cumbersome. If you work in TradFi you still have to wear dress pants a collared shirt tucked in even if it’s a summer 95 degree day. I’ve been told you can wear jeans on a Friday!

Anyways, I’ve never worked in TradFi and never will. I’ve been in fintech since I graduated and I have enjoyed every step. I think early on when I was at Stocktwits, building one of the first social networks, at a mass scale, specifically for traders/investors, we were considered pretty punk rock. That’s the perfect place to be – punk rock, doing something different, building a new process for what were previously old ways of doing things.

People forget that at Stocktwits we were talking about Buy The Dip before most people even knew what a meme was.

Now, at TradingView our charts, tech, and speed are paving the way for something similar. Anyone, anywhere, can access global markets with our app in their hand. Go from Wall Street to Tokyo with a singular swipe.

So what else in TradFi needs to be disrupted? I think crypto can play a massive role in the following:

• Mortgages
• Auto loans
• Creating a bank account
• Opening a brokerage account
• Money transfers that take more than 24 hours
• Basically anything that goes on at a bank
• Identity verification
• Two factor authentication protocols for money

I’m interested to see what the future holds and who will build the next great things in this space.

TradFi!