Harry Temkin has seen plenty of development throughout his decades in Fintech. 2026 sees him as excited as he has ever been for what comes next.
Temkin is the chief digital officer at DriveWealth, one of the most innovative companies in the space. As he works with companies to integrate novel features into their offerings, he brings a unique perspective on embedded finance, fractional investing, and other features that should dominate 2026.
Over his career, Temkin has built out proprietary trading systems and run eBay’s selling platform. He’s spent a decade at DriveWealth, which has long delivered efficient and cost-cutting technologies that execute trades for a fraction of the fees charged by others.
Democratizing investing for global investors is a key priority for DriveWealth. Temkin said it’s extremely expensive for international investors, especially retail ones, to invest in the US market. It doesn’t have to be, because the technology exists to make it simpler and more affordable.
Enter DriveWealth, which Temkin said developed the first API for cloud-based brokerage-as-a-service. Clients could easily embed it into their offerings with little infrastructure effort on their end. A decade ago, DriveWealth built fractional investing technology. Investors can invest to the eighth decimal of any security on the platform and acquire as little as one penny’s worth of stock.
“We offer price improvement and sub-one-share trades,” Temkin said. “We offer matched execution quality. So for example, you want $1,000 of stock, and it’s going to give you 2.1 shares. If the two shares gets price improvement, your 1/10 is also going to get that same price improvement.”
“It’s the one thing that has really transformed the industry, because it has allowed for so many new, innovative products to come to the marketplace. It’s allowed so many more people to participate in the marketplace.”
Fractional investing benefits new and sophisticated investors
Temkin listed several stocks that were listed in four figures, out of the range of many investors. With fractional investing, anyone can buy a piece of many top listings.
Investors across the spectrum benefit from such technology. Temkin said wealthier investors can place an order for a flat dollar amount of a stock, without worrying about price or number of shares. Through their access to several popular wallets, retail investors can add a roundup into their portfolio so purchases can be topped off to the next dollar (for example), with the surplus devoted to purchasing a stock of choice.
“It’s all done automatically, in real time, behind the scenes,” Temkin said. “It’s created a mechanism for new investors who honestly though they didn’t have the money to begin the investing journey.”
How important of a step is this for democratizing wealth-building opportunities? Temkin said two-thirds of those investors who begin with roundups eventually become self-directed investors. This allows parents to safely expose their kids to investing at an early age. They can program top-ups on their kids’ wallets and set appropriate controls. The upcoming Trump Accounts offer another exciting opportunity.
“They’re talking about opening this up to a much broader, younger set of people,” Temkin said. “That’s a massive opportunity that we want to be in a position to take advantage of, no question about it. And our technology is just special.”
Superapps, market trading, and cashless brokerages
In 2026, expect continued growth in the utility of financial super apps. Depending on a company’s goals, they could offer investing, loans, insurance, and more. Temkin said the goal is to own the customer through the complete financial experience so they don’t need to go anywhere else.
Cashless brokerages are another exciting opportunity. Temkin said they enable the wallet to serve as the single account of record. Imagine not having to transfer money into a brokerage account or worry about settlement. Crypto investors already have that; equity investors should, too.
“That’s what we’ve created,” Temkin said. “The money literally lives in the wallet, and we created a process where you just settle for the transactions that are occurring in the brokerage account, and that’s happening every day on settlement.”
“Say you want to buy $10 of stock. That experience becomes exactly the same experience as buying something physical. When you look at these apps, they have normalized brokerage into being just a sleeve of the wallet. So they even commingle all the transactions.”
“It’s incredible. There’s my cup of coffee at Starbucks, and the next transaction is a Starbucks dividend, or Starbucks Roundup, right? It’s all in this one place. There is no bifurcation anymore.”
Expect market trading to become more convenient, too. There’s already 24×5 trading that has fostered a more efficient and connected market. When one combines DriveWealth technologies with an overnight session, they get 24-hour access, just like crypto holders do.
“We’re just at the beginning,” Temkin said. “I think with 24×5, potentially it goes to 24×7. 24×5 gives us the opportunity to do software releases and other things. And no matter what you do, you have to think that equities are different than crypto. But the demand is there. Our international partners, they want to trade in their daytime, and they want access to us in their daytime. This is just a natural evolution of where the marketplace is going.”
AI and predictive markets: What’s coming next
Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows for faster and more efficient coding. It can conduct analytics on data sets and improve chat and support services. Temkin expects greater use in wealth management and called it the next iteration of robo-investing.
He’s also seeing huge growth and private credit and alternative assets.
Companies are eliminating barriers for investors seeking shares in pre-IPO companies. APIs handle all of the documentation. DriveWealth is evaluating the demand and considering how to integrate such services.
There is strong demand for predictive markets. They have power to attract new people to investing marketplaces. Predictive markets lend themselves well to analytics and trend evolution. Engagement is simplified.
“At the end of the day, I keep coming back to the super apps, or the wallets of the world,” Temkin said. “They truly have built an experience that has unlocked the ability for any user, regardless of their net worth, regardless of their income, to engage the markets right in a way that was never possible before.”
“It has made it so seamless. The ability to set up auto investing, to do the roundup,service, stock rewards, all of these things that they’re bringing investing in a way that wasn’t possible…It gets people involved in such a seamless way, and we’re doing that at a global scale. That’s what keeps me going.”