A Landmark Year for Clear Street

Four years ago, Clear Street started with the bold mission to replace the outdated infrastructure being used across capital markets. Legacy systems that were designed in the 1980s and run on mainframe technology still move trillions of dollars a day. For many firms, replacing these antiquated systems would be like removing the engine from a plane in mid-air.

Clear Street is facing that challenge head-on.

We’ve gone down to the bare metal to build a completely cloud-native system designed for the modern needs of a complex, global market. And we’re running a great business utilizing this technology.

Let’s take a look back at some of this year’s highlights from the three themes that defined Clear Street in 2022 — business, product, and people.

Business

Clear Street’s business growth in 2022 has been monumental. On a daily basis, we are now processing around 2.5% of the notional U.S. equities volume, which is roughly $10 billion worth of activity through our platforms. Plus, our client pipeline is strong too — we’ve onboarded more than 100 institutional prime brokerage clients in the last 12 months.

The team has made great progress in building out our client offering to support our growth. We launched our capital introduction and repo businesses, enhanced our securities lending capabilities, and introduced a portfolio of updates to build out and refine our client-facing position, risk, operations, and reporting portals.

We can’t talk about 2022 without mentioning our $165M Series B funding round. Thanks to our incredible team, Clear Street was cemented as a fintech unicorn. This was the first time since our inception that we raised external equity, putting our valuation at $1.7 billion.

Thank you to Prysm Capital and our other valued investors for believing in Clear Street’s mission and your continued support. With this addition of capital, we’re turbocharging tactical growth, expanding our engineering capabilities, and reaching new markets and asset classes.

Product

On the product side, we’ve been nose to the grindstone building out our technology stack. Over the past 12 months, Clear Street has introduced a swath of new offerings and improvements to enhance the client experience.

To name a few highlights, our engineering teams took on the daunting task of replacing our core transaction processing system. In April, we launched the final product, BK — a faster, more scalable model to support our growing business.

In October, we launched ATLAS (Automated Trading Locates Allocation System), our proprietary stock loan system, which allocates stock loan inventory to incoming customer requests. Customers can submit locate orders directly from their Order Management System via our FIX interface, through our web portal, or by using our robust, fully automated ReST API to programmatically submit locate requests.

These product developments bring us closer to our goal of providing all market participants, from emerging managers to large institutions, with the tools and services they need to compete in today’s fast-paced markets.

People

None of this would be possible without our people. In 2022, we grew to almost 400 employees and opened three offices nationwide. We expanded our sales and engineering teams, and welcomed Wall Street industry veterans to support our rapid growth strategy.

What makes Clear Street so special is the culture we’ve cultivated over the last four years. We have lunch together, grab drinks after work, help each other through challenges, and celebrate each other’s successes.

A big part of our culture includes giving back to the community. In June, we pledged $1 million to Traders4ACause, a non-profit dedicated to helping hand-selected charities, like the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

In September, we had the honor of hosting our first Charity Poker Tournament, which raised more than $20,000 for Camp Mak-A-Dream, a non-profit, cost-free camp for children, teens and young adults with cancer. Thank you to our Clear Street colleagues, clients, and friends for your generous donations and support throughout the year.

Needless to say, it’s been a landmark year for Clear Street. We hope you’ll join us in ringing in the new year.

See our full 2022 Year in Review here!