What good crypto integration looks like for wealthtech
A crypto API can look straightforward in documentation. Send an order, receive a response, retrieve a balance. Production is where the real questions appear. How does order flow map into the platform's existing systems? Where do assets sit after settlement, and how does that balance reconcile with the platform's own ledger? What comes back to Operations and Finance each day? What happens when the platform wants to add staking next year? And who helps Engineering through the edge case the documentation does not cover, three weeks before launch?
Choosing a crypto API for wealthtech is usually treated as a technical procurement exercise: compare endpoints, check the sandbox, sign. The endpoints matter, but the harder question is one of fit. A provider's platform is the same product for every client; it does not bend per integration. So the evaluation is whether the provider's trading, custody, and reporting, as they actually run, cover the flows the wealthtech needs, and how much work it is to map the platform's own systems onto them.
Start with the platform you already have
A wealthtech is not a blank page. It has a customer experience it will not compromise, product logic, an internal ledger, reporting obligations, and operational processes that already run every day. The mapping should start from those, which means the first conversation is about the wealthtech's platform, not the API reference.
The useful mapping questions: where do orders originate, and in what form? Which internal systems need an order's status, and how quickly? How should custodied balances map to customer entitlements in the platform's own records? What does Finance need for reconciliation, in what format? What does the platform expose to its own customers, and what stays internal? And which capabilities might come later, so the integration is not designed into a corner?
A workable integration path has a consistent shape: map the platform's order, custody, and reporting flows onto the provider's capabilities first, then build against the endpoints in sandbox, certify the flows end to end, launch with support through the first live orders, and run with reporting feeding the platform's systems. The capabilities on the other side are fixed; the early conversation establishes how the platform will use them, and surfaces anything the standard product does not cover while there is still time to design around it rather than three weeks before launch.
Endpoint coverage is the entry ticket, not the evaluation
The technical criteria still need checking, and each function on the buying side cares about a different one.
Engineering needs connectivity that fits the use case, REST or WebSocket as the flows require, documentation that describes intended behaviour rather than needing reverse engineering, and a sandbox realistic enough to test failure states, not just happy paths. Product needs the order lifecycle to be legible: after an instruction is sent, can the platform's systems tell what happened, in enough detail to drive a customer-facing state? Operations and Finance need the data path home: transaction-level reporting that traces each fill back to the instruction that caused it, in a form that closes the books without a spreadsheet rebuild. And everyone needs to know what the production transition looks like: what certification or readiness testing happens before real customer money moves.
A provider can score well on all of this and still integrate badly, which is why it is the entry ticket. The evaluation is what comes next.
One integration should cover more than the first use case
Most platforms start with spot trading. Fewer think at signing time about what the second and third capabilities will cost to add.
Some providers group trading, custody, and staking on supported assets within a single relationship; Aplo's proposition takes this shape. The commercial logic of the grouping is one counterparty, one contract, one integration, and one reporting feed, so that adding a capability later is an extension of an existing relationship rather than a second procurement, a second due diligence file, and a second reconciliation source.
Consolidation is a trade-off, not a law. Some platforms deliberately run specialist providers for separate functions, because a best-in-class custodian or staking provider matters more to them than a single reporting feed, and that can be the right call. The honest framing is that each additional provider adds a contract, an integration, a dependency, and a line in the reconciliation, and the platform should decide knowingly whether that cost buys something it values. What it should avoid is arriving at a multi-provider architecture by accident, one procurement at a time.
Positions after execution raise their own set of questions, from wallet structure to how the custody balance relates to the trading balance, and there is a fuller treatment of how institutional crypto custody works in practice that is worth reading alongside any provider's custody documentation.
Execution needs more than a buy and sell endpoint
A wealthtech's flow is not uniform. There is immediate customer flow that needs a firm price now, rebalancing that wants controlled placement, treasury activity, the occasional large order, and days when market conditions make all of it harder. Those do not call for the same execution method, and a provider whose execution layer offers only one way to reach the market pushes that limitation onto the platform's customers.
A full execution set runs from firm streamed prices with Fill or Kill orders for immediate flow, through Smart Order Routing and Direct Market Access, to algorithmic methods and high-touch handling for orders that need working. At evaluation stage the question is simply whether the provider's range covers the platform's actual order types, including the ones that only appear at quarter end.
Know what sits inside the price
An API that returns a price does not tell the platform how the order reached the market, whether the provider acted as agent or principal, what fee was charged, where the order filled, or how the result compares with a benchmark. For a platform putting its own name on execution quality, those gaps are what it cannot answer when a customer or a regulator asks.
The combination that makes execution reviewable: agency-only execution with no proprietary trading book, an agreed fee stated separately from the market price, venue-level fills, and benchmark comparisons on the post-trade report. This is Aplo's model, and none of it guarantees a better price on any given order; a provider claiming that should worry you. What it does is let the platform see the market cost and the provider cost as separate numbers, see where fills happened, and check outcomes against a benchmark over time. The full question set is in what to ask about crypto best execution, and it applies to any provider.
Documentation runs out before the questions do
Every platform is built differently, so at some point in every integration the documentation stops answering. Note what kind of questions these are: not requests for the product to change, but judgements about how to use what exists. How should this particular workflow be structured against the available capabilities? Which execution method suits this order type? Can the staking capability use the custody setup already in place? What should Operations do with the order that does not fit the usual flow?
Developer experience includes access to people, not only documentation. The practical test at evaluation stage: who answers Engineering's questions during the build, are they the same people afterwards, and do they understand the capabilities well enough to help map them onto the platform's workflows rather than reciting the docs back? Whatever the provider, a fintech should ask for the names before signing, not after the first stuck order, and should expect the answer to be a person with desk access rather than a queue. The Deskoin integration is a concrete example in a real fintech: previously manual operations automated through the API, and the asset range extended afterwards within the same relationship.
Integration does not finish at launch
Implementation content tends to end at go-live. For a financial platform, go-live is when the operating relationship starts. Reporting has to keep landing in internal systems as volumes grow. Custody and reconciliation run daily. Product flows change, and the integration changes with them. New assets and capabilities get added. Something, eventually, breaks at an inconvenient hour, and what matters then is whether the platform is talking to people who know its setup or opening a ticket with a queue.
So the evaluation question worth asking last covers everything after the project plan ends: what does the relationship look like in month nine, when the launch team has moved on? A provider should be assessed as an operating counterparty, not an implementation project. That is the difference between an integration that looked good in the demo and one still working, unremarked, two product cycles later.
If you are evaluating a crypto integration for a wealthtech or neobroker platform and want to understand how Aplo's trading, custody, and reporting capabilities would map onto your systems, speak to us.