Why We’re Building Our Next API in FinTech — And Why Timing Matters More Than Ever

Snowpal is building its next API in fintech as markets move toward longer trading hours, global participation, and rising retail activity.

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The Stock Market Is Changing — Our Next API Is Built for What Comes Next

At Snowpal, we’ve spent years building and running production-grade software products across multiple domains. Most recently, our focus has been on B2B APIs — tools designed to help teams move faster, build reliably, and scale without reinventing the wheel.

As we head into 2026, we’re starting work on our next API product. It will begin life as an API, but over time, it will grow into something broader — firmly rooted in the fintech space.

This article is a primer. A teaser. And the first in what will likely be a longer series where we share what we’re building, why we’re building it, and what we’re learning along the way.

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The Market - How it works today

To understand why we’re excited about fintech right now, it helps to step back and look at how the stock market itself works today.

In the U.S., the core trading window runs from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern — just 6.5 hours per day, across roughly 250 trading days per year. That’s about 1,625 hours of active trading annually.

Yes, there’s pre-market and after-hours trading, but anyone who’s participated knows the trade-offs:

• Much lower volume

• Wider spreads

• Higher risk

Those windows are not for everyone.

But that model is changing.

From everything we’re seeing and learning, the market is moving toward a 24-hour trading day, initially five days a week — with the same core trading window, plus extended sessions on either side.

Why? Because the U.S. stock market is no longer just an American market.

Investors from Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond want access — and a six-and-a-half-hour window doesn’t work globally.

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More Time, More Traders, More Volume

At the same time, trading volume has been trending upward for years.

COVID accelerated participation as people had more time and fewer alternatives. While that surge normalized, the baseline never went back down. And looking ahead, there are two powerful forces at work:

1. Global access to U.S. markets continues to expand

2. AI is reshaping work, freeing time — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not

In both scenarios, more people end up looking for ways to deploy capital, build income streams, or stay financially engaged. The stock market becomes an obvious place to look.

The result?

• More participants

• More trades

• Longer trading windows

• Higher sustained volume

And with that comes a simple reality: the need for better tools explodes.

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The Tooling Gap We Keep Running Into

We didn’t come to this conclusion from theory alone.

Over the past several months, we’ve been:

• Actively investing

• Actively trading

• Paper trading

• Studying markets hands-on

And what we’ve felt — repeatedly — is friction.

Yes, there are more tools today than there were a decade ago. But many of them:

• Feel dated

• Are overpriced for retail traders

• Are built primarily for institutions, not individuals

• Lack features that should exist by now

At the high end, you have tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. At the low end, you often get fragmented experiences that don’t scale with a trader’s growth.

Retail investors — whether passive, active, or somewhere in between — are largely underserved.

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Trading Is Hard — Process Is Everything

One statistic that often gets cited (and broadly aligns with what we’ve observed) is that most day traders quit quickly:

• A large majority exit within months

• Most never achieve consistent profitability

That’s not because they’re unintelligent. It’s because trading:

• Is emotionally demanding

• Requires discipline

• Demands repeatable systems

• Punishes improvisation

If your goal is something as “simple” as averaging $1,000 per day, you quickly realize how much structure is required:

• Clear plans

• Risk management

• Defined processes

• Consistent execution

Doing all of this manually is not impossible — but it’s painful, error-prone, and unsustainable for most people.

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Why We’re Building in FinTech

This is where our background matters.

At Snowpal, we’ve:

• Built multiple production systems

• Served both B2B and B2C users

• Operated as a polyglot engineering team

• Shipped, maintained, and scaled real products over years

Fintech sits at the intersection of two things we care deeply about:

• Finance

• Software engineering

We believe we’re well-positioned to build modern, API-first tooling that:

• Respects how people actually trade and invest

• Helps users spend less time while making better decisions

• Is affordable, flexible, and extensible

• Evolves alongside market structure changes

We’re also committed to sharing our learnings openly — even if that means giving away ideas. We’re confident in our ability to execute, and we welcome healthy competition.

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What Comes Next

This is just the beginning.

In future posts and videos, we’ll dive into:

• Specific problems we’re tackling

• Where existing platforms fall short

• How extended trading hours change system design

• What retail-first fintech tooling should look like

Think of this as episode one.

We’ll keep the conversation going.

Talk soon.