The team at Addepar, a leading asset manager, recently had a detailed discussion with Ruchir Swarup, CTO at the company.
Ruchir Swarup is currently responsible for leading the tech teams that have made Addepar the “platform of choice” for wealth management companies. Addepar offers efficient access to financial data required by RIAs, family offices, and banking institutions to “better serve” their customers and “build their practices.”
Responding to a question about why some of the best tech talent chooses to work at Addepar, Ruchir said:
“The best engineers want to solve complex problems that matter. Building a robust and a highly scalable platform for financial data analytics and reporting across unique investment vehicles is quite complex. So, a lot of tech-obsessed, solution-oriented Engineers find the work here very meaningful and exciting.”
Ruchir also mentioned that people are wanting their work to have a significant impact and “create value.” He pointed out that if you address a problem that nobody really cares about, then it can lead to a disappointing experience.
According to Ruchir, Addepar’s solutions have been developed to “make a difference” in the lives of their customers —and the clients they serve.
While commenting on what really differentiates a good tech architecture from a bad one, Ruchir noted:
“It’s important for a technology architecture to be able to scale and evolve with the needs of our client organizations. That doesn’t mean that an architecture with scale challenges is bad per se. But every company that has a growth path needs a roadmap that enables architectural evolution, which ultimately supports business growth and expansion.”
In response to a question about what he thinks is more impressive about Addepar’s tech stack, he said:
“I would say that Addepar has one of the most scalable and innovative tech stacks out there. We process millions of accounts for hundreds of client firms every day with predictable precision and dependability. You can measure it and observe it—Addepar is resilient and scalable enough to absorb new clients of any size with ease.”
Going on to comment on their open-source library and various other aspects of Addepar’s codebase that they might consider open-sourcing, Ruchir stated:
“We discuss these options all the time and as a team, we have an open-source mindset. Large parts of our stack are built on open-source technology that we routinely deliver to clients. We certainly have created a considerable amount of unique code that’s patent-worthy. But we believe in democratizing our efforts and working closely with clients to solve massive challenges with open-source technology, and we’ll continue to do that.”
While commenting on his present area of focus as Addepar’s CTO and how he stays up-to-date about the latest tech developments, Ruchir said:
“One of our most important areas of focus at the moment is to support the significant trajectory of growth we’re seeing here at Addepar. Our clients and prospects are highly sophisticated firms and many are global businesses. So, one of our key initiatives is ensuring that our technology stack and the product features are congruent with our client needs worldwide.”
He added that “separately, as a part of expanding our footprint outside of the US, we recently announced our first international office in Edinburgh, Scotland.”
He also revealed that they are working on “the buildout with our R&D team hiring for exceptional talent in the Data and Engineering space.”