How Are Dev Shops In Chicago Using APIs? A Talk With Bryson Pouw At Blaze Portfolio

I recently talked with Bryson Pouw (@bpouw), Founder / CEO at Blaze Portfolio Systems in Chicago about how his portfolio management and trading technology company sees the world of APIs. Last week I had talked with Dave Devitt (@sydcon), President at SYDCON, a web development shop, and this week I was very interested to hear Bryson’s view on APIs, because his company is a little more niche, focusing specifically on the needs of the investment professional.

Atom Align, the Blaze Portfolio Systems flagship product is looking to help investment professionals better manage their portfolios, and a big enabler of this is the Atom Align API, which provides programmatic access to:

  • Information Queries – Obtain the list of portfolios, orders, brokers, and securities
  • Trade Orders – Place, execute, cancel, and allocate trade orders
  • Manage Trade Extracts – Create and download trade extract file

The Atom Align API is only made available to trusted Blaze Portfolio partners and clients upon request, while also being used internally to drive system integrations. This approach to API design, as the core for specialty, or even widely available web and mobile applications, is the signature of a software development shop that has evolved and realized that a core API stack is essential for internal, as well as external integrations—APIs aren’t just for public consumption when it comes to todays dev shop operations.

Beyond their own internal Atom Align API, Blaze Portfolio also uses several other financial related APIs as part of their core operations. APIs are core to the Atom Align secret sauce, aggregating, refining, and making sense of markets by pulling data and content from multiple API sources, most notably financial data from Xignite. You can’t be an investment professional in 2014 without having the right technology in your toolbox, and Blaze Portfolio has done well aggregating financial data from public API sources, into tje tool the pros are needing.

Blaze Portfolio Systems designing, deploying, and managing their own internal APIs, as well as consuming multiple publicly available APIs, provides an interesting blueprint that other software development shops can follow. There is money to be made in managing your own API infrastructure, using the best of breed, publicly available data and API sources--then craft it all into your own API driven software solution that can deliver web, mobile, or even device based solutions for niche or mainstream customers.

Photo Credit: Diego Naive