Nir joined TipRanks in 2019 to lead the company’s research and development (R&D) team. In under a year and a half, he has implemented major improvements to the platform. These include expanding market coverage to Canada and soon the UK and scaling TipRanks cloud systems to support hyper-growth. With a sharp mind and calm manner, Nir is putting the “tech” into “fintech”.
What attracted you to the world of fintech?
My father works in the financial industry and many family members have followed in his footsteps, including myself. In the 6th grade, while other kids wrote essays about soccer and basketball, I was writing about the stock market, explaining the concept of a share.
At 15 my rock band needed a website so I taught myself to program. Programing has been a passion ever since. I studied Economics at Tel Aviv University and went on to get a Masters in Technology Management.
At TipRanks I get to combine my 3 passions – software, finance, and well… drums.
Which projects interest you the most and why?
What excites me most is to make an impact by giving retail investors real value. We do this by developing tools that only major financial institutions usually have access to.
The largest project we are working on right now is globalization. We are extending TipRanks research tools to fully support Canadian and UK stocks and listings. Laying the infrastructure for this task has been very challenging and involved all teams. Now that it’s in place, we can support an even wider range of stocks, listings, and dual-stocks currency permutations. We design projects to improve how our clients interact with our platform – this can be through a blazing fast news portal or a self-hosted checkout and payment page.
What can TipRanks users expect to see in future?
We extract valuable data from any financial source using cutting-edge NLP and Machine Learning techniques.
We are investing our resources in leveraging advances in these fields of technology to bring investors fresh new datasets and signals as soon as data is published.
In the short term, we’ll continue to globalize our website, launch our much-anticipated Android app, and research new datasets. We also have some surprises up our sleeves!
TipRanks partners with some of the largest banks and trading platforms in the world. How do you adapt TipRanks products for these institutions?
The past year has been super-exciting. We integrated TipRanks tools and features into many top tier platforms, including Canada’s TD Bank. They integrated TipRanks proprietary datasets into their newest platform as well as their traditional systems. They joined other big names such as e-Trade, Santander, Saxo Bank, Interactive Brokers, and more. Meanwhile, Nasdaq.com, a long-time partner has continued to use TipRanks Smart Portfolio as the underlying engine for investors’ portfolio management.
We work with amazing talent from all around the globe to adapt our products. This way, we ensure together that their end users get a product that works well for their needs. This process is an essential part of the partnership. Our partners repeatedly report that their customers are extremely satisfied with the value that TipRanks tools provide, which of course is fantastic to hear.
You manage a team of 9 people. How have you managed to do this while working from home for the past 7 months?
The TipRanks Applications team – Nofar, Shlomi, Andrey, Moshe, Aizik, Kirill, Guy, Hanan, and Sagit is a bunch of super-talented geeks.
We share a love and passion for high-end user experience and reliable consistent data. Managing experienced senior developers mostly involves coordinating tasks with other teams – Data, Product, Marketing, Content, UI/UX – and ensuring that everyone focuses on the most important features. I delegate the actual work to my team to give them the freedom to craft their magic.
Looking back, I would never have considered that working from home could be as efficient as sitting together. However, although it is counter-intuitive, working remotely has made us even more robust and mission-driven. For example, we laser-focus on our prioritized tasks. This is reflected in our ever-growing user base, with more sales, increased traffic, and faster release cycles.
And finally, how would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Family-man. Geek. Drummer.
